Editor’s Note: This three-part series seeks to identify the problem to act on, rather than approach each challenge as isolated. In part one, we addressed the teacher shortage and found that it is not the problem, it is a challenge. In part two, we addressed student attrition, loss of enrollment to any alternatives, and found that it too, is not the problem. It is a challenge.
The maxim cited in both part one and part two is restated here: If the problem that is attempting to be solved is not the problem, it won’t be solved. It will get worse.
The Pandemic Issue
The first thing to wonder about the achievement loss centers on the pandemic. However, the pandemic is not the cause of the achievement problem because academic scores went flat just prior to the pandemic. “Long-term trend data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that 9-year-old students scored, on average, five points lower in reading and seven points lower in math in 2022 than did their pre-pandemic peers in 2020. The declines represent the largest drops in decades; for the past two decades, student scores have gradually trended up before flattening just prior to the pandemic.”
Whoa, that’s not the talking point right now, is it? There is social agreement that the pandemic caused steep drops, and it did, but not for every student. The knuckle-biter is the fact that achievement had gone flat just prior. Therefore, even though it is a problem right now, it is not the problem. The problem of achievement started earlier and has been an unrelenting issue in schools, but not all schools. That’s not to say there is not some catching up to do, but with current courseware, students have been known to be able to get through modules in record time, sometimes finishing whole grades worth of work in a quarter of the time, while still having teacher interaction. Achievement digitally can be levered flexibly, achievement tied to old-fashioned whole group methods of teaching is not as flexible.
The Lingering Questions Issue
The questions to be asking are then not as much related to achievement itself as the components that go into it, which include the make-up of the student body, the difference in awareness and interests of the new generation being centered on tech channels, social-emotional issues, new health dynamics, culture shift, what teachers are doing, what constitutes true digital versus digitized only in curriculum, and the biggie: the logistics of teaching and learning in this age.
- The Student Body Question
There is no doubt that the American student body has shifted. The degree to which it is different is evident in districts like Salt Lake City, Utah, where over 100 different foreign languages need to be served. Please see Part 2 of this article series for info on the potential that the top-line Federal Department of Education (DOE) and the NCES have a total enrollment 13.5 million students short of the total number of actual K-12 aged persons in the United States. That is an enormous number to go missing. It was speculated that these may be immigration because the Census may know more than anyone else about what is really happening with both legal and illegal immigration. The language and numbers of English Language Learners is evident to nearly all schools as markedly different than only 10 years ago. Some districts even run programs to let members of the Latino community who recently immigrated from some South American countries know that education over the 8th grade is free, and they can in fact continue. In South American countries it is not free, and so the apparent drop out and lowered achievement might look huge.
- What Teachers are Doing Question
The question always arises, what are teachers doing that achievement was flat before the pandemic and apparently dropped precipitously during it? Well, there are plenty of reasons that things went wonky, but very little was blamed on teachers. In fact, teacher reviews are almost universally great even while student achievement may be down. A curious anomaly. No one knows if this is because one or more teachers is flawed but seemed to give a good review, or if it is the nature of schooling that divorces the student path from the individual teacher’s responsibility and spreads it across multiple teachers or institutional processes. No one knows if it is the structure itself, the students who are just different than earlier generations, or what is happening. Teachers, then, are not the problem in achievement because they cannot be isolated as the problem.
- The Health Protocol Changes May Equal Developmental Delays Question
While this is mere speculation, recent years’ protocols to offer legions of vaccines in close array which earlier generations did not have, are now seeing similar negative effects to the findings around Gulf War Syndrome where a multiplicity of vaccines and medicines were offered in few shots. In fact, parents have been concerned with schedules of too many shots, many with adult dosages, in their under-two-year-old children for a long time. While numerous government institutions have forwarded studies seeming to disprove a link to autism, which has been cited as due to the aluminum contents in vaccines, the same heavy metal now tied to Alzheimer’s, a learning concern lingers that an epidemic of autism is a relatively new phenomenon which logically would come from something being newly done. Or not, but again, the worry lingers. Research doctors have come forward citing studies that do not necessarily look at the shots themselves but at the comparison between the health of the unvaccinated with the heavily vaccinated over time – and these are now reputable scientific sources citing serious differences.
Children between birth and age 6 receive up to 36 vaccine doses to protect against 14 different diseases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recommended schedule (2020.) By ages 1 and 2, the CDC recommends approximately 21 and 28 such vaccination doses, respectively. The number of vaccine doses received by infants and children has increased most notably since the early 1990s, when the hepatitis B and Haemophilus influenzae type B vaccines were introduced. Currently, children in the United States are vaccinated for hepatitis A and B, Haemophilus influenzae type B, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, rotavirus, pneumococcal pneumonia, influenza and varicella.
Take a look at the results of that study, which shockingly reveal an over 100 percent increase in developmental delays.
These figures are just for the first year of life, the data from three-year-olds shows similar developmental delays -- and they are worse in boys.
Do these developmental delays hold and have an effect life-long? It seems probable, but we do not know for sure since no studies exist that care about this. It could be a part of the problem because the big spiking of shots on the schedules happened in the last 20 years and is now increasingly showing up to cause more work for teachers and schools. In the 1980’s children in America had half-doses of only a handful of shots, which are now full doses and four to five times the number total. Perhaps we will never know the extent of this as an impact or if there is in fact any long-term impact at all, but it has one research point of interest and that is date coincidence with progressive achievement loss despite increasing hard work by teachers and innovations in curriculum. The achievement loss inflection going higher in the pandemic, is just one inflection point among earlier ones that have date coincidence with other changes – vaccines being added is only one of them.
The Tech Channels Generation Question
Another one is that in the past twenty years mobile phones and iPads have been in the hands of children at very young ages for long lengths of time. There are several repercussions of this that could be resulting in lower academic achievement which could be:
- Transactional “Language” Pattern Shift. There is a noticeable habit of shorter information ingestion, a sort of “language” pattern that is more transactional. It is not necessarily met by instructional materials or instructors in traditional classrooms. Much of the classroom is “long-form learning,” not the bite-size sorts of chunks today’s learners are inculcated in for years with social media. It could be said that long-form learning, mostly lecturing and long discussions, are a remnant of earlier ages when an hour to two hours in church with lengthy sermons was almost universal. Local political gatherings of elders or whole communities would have many hours of lengthy discussions with rotations of speakers and audience rules.
- Attention Truncation. What used to be a rather rare disorder has exploded now that short-form information is a habit for most youth. This habit lays in a mental mechanism of “seeking the next bit” within a short time frame after encountering the first bit or piece of information. If information is delivered in too long a format, the mind through habit will wander after the same usual short length, stopping the rest of the long format from arriving while the mind seeks skips to the next bit. This could be one of the most significant reasons why achievement loss continues to perpetuate. It is tied to the transactional language pattern shift of short-form versus long-form, but here we’re beyond the structure of the learning resource or the delivery by the teacher and into a routine habit of the minds of present youth. Attention truncation is a problem calling for a range of solutions that include orientation to long-form learning, re-habituating that level of attention. Another solution is to move more of learning delivery and resources into truncated chunks divided by the same sorts of breaks experienced in texting and social media.
Average attention spans: 7 minutes for 2-year-olds, 9 minutes for 3-year-olds, 12 minutes for 4-year-olds and 14 minutes for 5-year-olds.
Continued attention to a freely chosen task range from about 5 minutes for a two-year-old child to a maximum of 20 minutes in older children and adults.
- Radiation. Phones with 5G, and blue light from any computing screen have raised some concerns that youths may be being exposed to more radiation which is known to create a depressing of mental state.
- Schools digitize and have not transitioned to true digital. An aspect of the difference on mobile or desktop devices is that most students have used consumer-grade items on them that are highly professional with quality user-interface and user experience, such that two-year-olds can use them without any instruction but only mimicry of adults seen swiping screens. Yet schools still hand out paper packets and teachers use mere digital documents to delivery most of the discrete items that constitute the knowledge to be relayed. These forms are “flat” in terms of their clickability for instant definitions of words, their animation, their personalization and the thrill of shooting-star rewards when a student gets the question right. This is another level of being out-of-sync with the digital age. Non-pro digital has an intense number of levels of wrongness to it when considering all aspects of pro-grade crafting a piece of knowledge could be delivered including numbers of minutes a piece of knowledge is allowed on screen before quizzing to ascertain rate of absorption and then speeding up or slowing down accordingly.
Other questions center around social-emotional issues and changing culture. Both things are currently having an impact on achievement, there is no doubt, but these seem to be presently tied together. The greater shift is around a culture that is in the midst an exodus from cities, from the routines of life pre-pandemic, and has yet to settle. This is a major trend of social and cultural change that accelerated during the pandemic but was already going on. The differences socially will be as stark as they were when society moved from the agricultural age and farm life to the industrial age and city life. Society is now once again moving, this time out of high-density cities. The social-emotional shift is not just the pandemic, but something much larger. It is not temporary but founded on a new yearning for slowing life down that includes a back-to-family, back-to-self-reliance in myriad ways like home gardens, cooking skills, and doing things more naturally that have less impact on the environment. The frenetic driving everywhere constantly for the last nearly one hundred years is being dialed down and is reputedly a major causation of the homeschooling and alternative or community schooling growth.
The Leadership Issue
Now on to the biggie: the logistics of teaching and learning in this age.
Long-held policies have calcified the whole group methodologies, constant testing, seat-time requirements, and much more that schools find troubling to maneuver around. This burdens both leaders and teaches who must try to adapt-in-place when the obvious answer is a structural shift towards personalized learning that doesn’t use whole group but instead backwards engineers in teaching on-demand as the solution to all the problems. More about what this is exactly, later.
Design thinking isn’t even in most school or district leaders’ repertoires – they try to fix the issues they encounter with programmatic thinking. With the stack of problems shown in these three articles, none of which are the problem, program changes will not fix what ails schools but make the problems worse.
The real problem is logistics. When the issues are time and space flexibility, cultural desire for perfected personalized learning, myriad other changes, the form of institutional address must be analyzed for how it fits.
You may think in this dichotomy:
Traditional Schools:
- Whole group structured classes
- Teacher-as-learning-distribution mechanism
- Teacher selected resources
- Time & space dependent
- Tech augments
Versus:
Online Schools
- Whole group structured courses
- Mostly teacherless
- Central pre-created Resources
- Remote, flexible
- Tech mechanized
But there is a third thing on the scene:
Courseware
- Individually paced
- Teacher as-needed intersection
- Pro-grade digital crafted pathways, testing, remediation
- Time & space independent
- Tech systematized
This last one, courseware, is growing faster than the rate of either of the other two. This incudes the unbelievable rate of growth of tutoring services. Tutoring spend by parents in the U.S. is already at $8.37 billion in 2021, accelerating at a CAGR of 7.61%. Total spend by consumers on digital curriculum resources of all kinds is over twice what all schools put together spend and growing much faster. It particularly accelerated during the pandemic.
An issue with schools and teachers dealing with courseware is that it is awesome. Teachers feel a bit side-lined by it, but that may be the residual clinging to whole-group orientation which is unnecessary with courseware. Instead, a willingness to let students zoom forward, even go up to another grade-level teacher, while they focus attention on students who need more help is what is needed. The learning is student-centric, teachers service those pathways on-demand. They get to plan learning and social activities around the courseware, which typically takes less time than all whole-group ingestion of knowledge simultaneously.
Reviewing these three things, traditional versus online schools versus courseware, the real problem emerges. How to use the best of all three? That’s the missing thing – the logistics of being in-person versus remote. Teaching traditionally versus letting the online course or courseware do some heavy lifting. Whole grouping versus totally flexible personalization. How to utilize human teachers for the help that is truly needed versus all the reporting, classroom discipline, trying to individualize but keep all the students roughly together in a group, creating all the lessons, etc.
For one thing the lesson-planning load on teachers is enormous. The rather sanctimonious lesson planning steps to take, “Five Easy Lesson Planning Steps (that are really nine steps, and each one takes an hour!)” is ridiculous when the age of textbooks gave scope and sequence but then mostly got ripped away leaving a black hole of work to be done. A lesson plan every single day is rarely done by most teachers anyway because it’s just too much, even when a teacher is working double overtime during the school year.
The use of time and space and personnel has changed in nearly every other industry. The wasting of time in traditional schools is a point of frequent attack. Homeschoolers commonly cite getting all their work done in two and a half hours a day. Counter-arguments are that “families need babysitters.” This may be true for some, but not for all. As work environments change, this is changing as well.
The Age of Logistics and creating the right matrix of types of learning is here. It will of necessity be a hybrid age, because all students are not the same. Some thrive on the energy of the social environment and learn better within it. Others most definitely do not. What is right for each one, were it to be executed flawlessly, will be the answer to the teacher shortage, the answer to attrition and the answer to achievement.
The problem is the structure, exactly how learning can be delivered with a hybrid fit to the local community.
A logistics inquiry by many forward-thinking educators has already formed. You can find it here: The Hybrid Logistics Project.
About the author
LeiLani Cauthen is the CEO and Publisher of The Learning Counsel. She is well versed in the digital content universe, software development, the adoption process, school coverage models, and helping define this century’s real change to teaching and learning. She is an author and media personality with twenty years of research, news media publishing and market leadership in the high tech, education and government industries.
References
1.) Digging Deeper Into the Stark Declines on NAEP: 5 Things to Know, Education Week, Sarah Schwartz — September 02, 2022 https://www.edweek.org/leadership/digging-deeper-into-the-stark-declines-on-naep-5-things-to-know/2022/09
Source: The Nation’s Report Card, Mathematics and Reading at Grade 12, http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_g12_2015/#mathematics/scores
Source: The Nation’s Report Card, Mathematics and Reading at Grade 12, http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_g12_2015/#reading/scores
2.) Report: Gulf War Syndrome linked to vaccines, CNN.Uk, Monday, January 12, 2004, https://www.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/01/12/britain.syndrome.reut/index.html
3.) Gulf War Syndrome 'linked to vaccines', The Irish Times, Mon Jan 12, 2004, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/gulf-war-syndrome-linked-to-vaccines-1.966522
4.) New Study Links Vaccination to Gulf War Syndrome, CNSNews London, Patrick Goodenough | July 7, 2008 | 8:08pm EDT, https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/new-study-links-vaccination-gulf-war-syndrome
5.) Do Our Children Receive Too Many Vaccines?Or are parents' fears overblown? Vibha Akkaraju, April 21, 2002https://www.nymetroparents.com/article/Do-Our-Children-Receive-Too-Many-Vaccines-Or-are-parentsfears-overblown- “According to an article published in January's Pediatrics journal, "One hundred years ago, children received one vaccine (the smallpox vaccine). Forty years ago, children received five vaccines routinely (diphtheria, pertussis, polio, tetanus, and smallpox vaccines), and as many as eight shots by two years of age. Today, children receive 11 vaccines routinely and as many as 20 shots by two years of age."
6.) Analysis of health outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated children: Developmental delays, asthma, ear infections and gastrointestinal disorders, Brian S Hooker and Neil Z Miller, National Library of Medicine, 2020 May 27, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7268563/ “…children between birth and 6 years of age receive up to 36 vaccine doses to protect against 14 different diseases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recommended schedule.2 By ages 1 and 2 years, the CDC recommends approximately 21 and 28 such vaccination doses, respectively. The number of vaccine doses received by infants and children has increased most notably since the early 1990s, when the hepatitis B and Haemophilus influenzae type B vaccines were introduced. Currently, children in the United States are vaccinated for hepatitis A and B, Haemophilus influenzae type B, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, rotavirus, pneumococcal pneumonia, influenza and varicella.”
7.) Teacher Observations Have Been a Waste of Time and Money, Education Next, Mark Dynarski, https://www.educationnext.org/teacher-observations-have-been-a-waste-of-time-and-money/
“Measures of student achievement point to low levels and meager improvement. Measures of teaching indicate nearly every teacher is effective. But teachers are the most important input to learning—something’s amiss.
What is amiss is that the information is not based on equally sound measurements. Student achievement is soundly measured; teacher effectiveness is not. The system is spending time and effort rating teachers using criteria that do not have a basis in research showing how teaching practices improve student learning. Achievement is not high and not improving.
Recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that most of America’s fourth, eighth, and twelfth grade students are not proficient in math and reading. Results from testing in 2015 showed that 60 percent of fourth graders, 57 percent of eighth graders, and 75 percent of twelfth graders are not proficient in math. Nor are they close to being proficient—for example, 37 percent of twelfth graders scored at the basic level of proficiency and 38 percent scored below the basic level.
Not much has changed in the last decade. The first figure shows the average 17-year-old scoring 150 in math in 2005 and 152 in 2015, which is down from 2013.
Measures of teacher effectiveness vary state by state but results are consistent—nearly every teacher is effective. This consistency was named the ‘widget effect’ in a 2009 report (all widgets are the same).[iii] A number of states implemented new teacher evaluation systems in the last ten years, and there is still a widget effect. In Florida, 98 percent of teachers are effective; New York: 95 percent; Tennessee: 98 percent; Michigan: 98 percent.[iv] New Jersey implemented a new evaluation system in 2014 and 97 percent of teachers were ‘effective’ or ’highly effective.’[v] That 3 percent of teachers were rated as ineffective was a significant increase from the evaluation system it replaced, which had rated 0.8 percent of teachers as ineffective. But it still implies nearly universal effectiveness.
It’s nearly impossible to raise these rates. In states that have multiple designations, teachers can possibly move from ‘effective’ to highly effective.’ But unless there are financial or professional incentives to do so, such as pay increases or certification by the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, there’s little reason for teachers rated as effective to change what they already are doing.[vi]
Effective is defined as “producing a decided, decisive, or desired effect.” Education is cumulative in nature, so, a twelfth grader who is not achieving at the basic level has had a dozen or more teachers contributing to their education. Nearly all of them will have been rated as effective. What effect did they produce?
Teacher rating systems are more of an issue.[viii] The bulk of the rating, typically more than 50 percent of it, is based on observing teachers in classrooms. Other factors that may be considered include student test scores, growth of scores, collegiality or professionalism, or findings from surveys of students. But observing teachers is the centerpiece of most rating systems.
Observations are straightforward. A principal (or district administrator) comes into a teacher’s classroom with a measurement tool in hand (now more often on a laptop), and checks off whether he or she observes various things in the classroom. For example, does the teacher demonstrate knowledge of the curriculum? Does the teacher ask open-ended questions that cause students to think at a higher level in formulating answers? Do students appear engaged?
But what principals observe is whether teachers are teaching. The crucial question is whether students are learning. To answer that, we need some measure of learning: a test. Using test scores to evaluate teachers has been controversial, to put it mildly.[ix] Various commentators have argued that test scores are problematic for evaluating individual teachers. Neither the number of observations of a teacher or students in a classroom is large, so average classroom scores can be expected to vary from year to year because of expected measurement error even if the teacher is the same and student characteristics are the same.[x]
If what is found in observations mirrors what is found in tests, there’s little reason to do both and the issue of evaluating teachers with test scores becomes moot. Do observations discriminate between teachers whose students learn a lot and teachers whose students do not?
They don’t. Teacher observation scores and student test scores show little correlation. This evidence was recently reviewed by the Institute of Education Sciences, which concluded that “teacher knowledge and practice, as measured in existing studies, do not appear to be strongly and consistently related to student achievement.”[xi] The Measures of Effective Teaching study found that overall observation scores had small and mostly insignificant correlations with test scores, and correlations with scores on individual observation items likewise were small.[xii] Another study investigated correlations between observations of math instruction and math achievement. Correlations between practices observed in classrooms and math scores were small, and some were negative.[xiii] Another recent study using the same data set found that teacher observation scores also were not correlated with so-called ‘noncognitive’ outcomes such as ‘grit’ and ‘growth mindset.’[xiv]
Alternately stated, evidence about teacher knowledge and practice is weakly and inconsistently related to student achievement. Observations are fundamentally about teacher practice. The finding is saying observations and test scores are measuring different things.”
8.) Time Wasted In School: Outside of Class, Reagan Ramm, Sep. 24, 2015, Coastal Conservatory, https://coastalconservatory.com/2015/09/24/time-wasted-in-school-outside-of-class/
9.) Time Wasted In School: The Electives, Reagan Ramm, Oct. 1, 2015, Coastal Conservatory, https://coastalconservatory.com/2015/10/01/time-wasted-in-school-the-electives/
10.) Time Wasted In School: The Core Classes, Reagan Ramm, Oct. 8, 2015, Coastal Conservatory, https://coastalconservatory.com/2015/10/08/time-wasted-in-school-the-core-classes/
“Lesson starts are transitional events which may cause management problems for teachers. In this study 131 lesson starts of equally many teachers were observed in primary and secondary schools in Finland. The results indicated that, in general, the problems were minimal. However, for various reasons lesson starts were delayed by an average of about six minutes. Calculated on this basis, the total loss of instructional time in the whole school year was about five weeks of schooling.”
11.) Lesson Plans Are a Complete Waste of Time, GadFlyOnTheWallBlog, September 16, 2021 Steven M. Singer https://gadflyonthewallblog.com/2021/09/16/lesson-plans-are-a-complete-waste-of-time/ “It’s the FORMAL lesson plans that have next to nothing to do with what goes on in the classroom. I’m talking about the kind with detailed objectives often written in behavioral terms (i.e. Students Will Be Able To…), essential questions that are supposed to link your units into cohesive blocks, explicit reference to the formative and summative assessments you plan to give and exhaustive reference to every Common Core Academic Standard non-educators ever wrote to sell text books, workbooks, software and other boondoggles.”
12.) How to Write a Lesson Plan in 7 Steps, https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/how-to-write-a-lesson-plan (Note the 7 steps are actually 11 and the last one has 7 optional directions to go with homework.)
13.) Lesson Plans? No Problem! Paths to Literacy, Liz Fagan. https://www.pathstoliteracy.org/lesson-plans-no-problem/ “Lesson plans help keep the focus on the objectives you are working on, skills you’re wanting to teach in a systematic format, and a great way to document your time. If you’re ever called into a dispute, your lesson plans could be asked for.”
14.) Finding the Time, Part 1: Teachers Must Preserve Their Most Valuable Resource, Edutopia, Ben Johnson, March 8, 2008, https://www.edutopia.org/time-school-resource-part-one “You might consider the teacher's knowledge or skills in teaching as his or her most valuable resource. You might think support from the school administration, a well-written curriculum, sufficient teaching aids, varied strategies, or perhaps even the students themselves would be the most valuable resource to an educator. Amazingly enough, though, it is the resource that we often pay the least attention to and end up abusing (wasting) more than any other. I contend that the most valuable resource that a teacher has is time.
During a typical lesson, a teacher employs the professional teaching-and-learning cycle: study, select, plan, implement, analyze, and adjust. You can read a brief explanation of the cycle in a comment I made to another previous blog entry. During the implementation phase (Madeline Hunter would be proud of me), the teacher spends time introducing the lesson, giving direct instruction, and modeling the lesson. The teacher then gives the students both guided and individual practice, followed by a final closure activity. Of all of those time segments, which one is the most important? To answer that question, I'll ask another question: When are the students learning the most? Wouldn't that be when students are practicing? Looking at this issue more closely, in a traditional class, are all students learning if they are simply listening to the teacher talking?
Not likely. Even though some students may be able to retain the information in short-term memory, the rest will have difficulty remembering what the teacher said without notes or aids. The only ways to push knowledge or comprehension-level information and skills into long-term memory is practice, memorization, or participation in varied higher-order thinking activities. (See Bloom's Taxonomy.) These activities are, by their very nature, engaging activities. A student cannot easily sit by while all of the other students are actively engaged in a project.
15.) Success Academy teachers don’t plan their lessons, and other teachers shouldn’t either
Chalkbeat, Sherry Lewkowicz,Oct 6, 2014, 11:21am CDT https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2014/10/6/21096227/success-academy-teachers-don-t-plan-their-lessons-and-other-teachers-shouldn-t-either
They realized it worked better to dedicate a team of qualified people to developing lessons, who give the lessons to teachers with the expectation that they will be modified. (My interviewer even emphasized the poor results of teachers who simply delivered the lessons without taking ownership of them.) In short, Success sees the foolishness of having teachers, on a daily basis, reinventing the wheel when there are people within the school who understand how things should work. It’s time traditional public schools admit the same.
I certainly understand the resistance that many teachers feel at the idea of being given lessons. They understandably fear being “forced” to teach lessons that are uninspiring or poorly planned. Many resist using someone else’s lessons out of fear the lessons won’t cohere with the expectations of their school or with the needs of their students (or following experiences with pre-packaged curriculum materials that failed to do so). It’s also rare to see lessons that are comprehensive enough to be useful. For example, it is easy to find teaching guides for particular novels or plays, but quite rare to find actual lessons. It is also hard to find assessments—and I don’t mean a multiple-choice test or a description of a project. I mean the handout describing the assessment, the assessment’s rubric, the graphic organizers that break down steps, and a completed sample assessment. Teachers have a lot of well-founded doubts about how useful and complete someone else’s lessons are going to be.
Perhaps most of all, teachers don’t want lessons based on someone else’s passions. As an English teacher, I know how difficult it can be to teach a text that I don’t love.
But at the end of the day, when I think of all the time I spend creating and modifying lessons, I know I would give up lesson planning if I could.”
16.) 8 Things That Waste The Most Teacher Time, the Back to School Blog, Terry Heick, https://thebacktoschoolblog.com/2022/02/8-things-that-waste-the-most-teacher-time/
17.) Digging Deeper Into the Stark Declines on NAEP: 5 Things to Know, By Sarah Schwartz — September 02, 2022 9 min read https://www.edweek.org/leadership/digging-deeper-into-the-stark-declines-on-naep-5-things-to-know/2022/09
18.) Impact of Social Media on Our Attention Span and its Drastic Aftermath, by V A Mohamad Ashrof —CounterCurrents, 12/04/2021 https://countercurrents.org/2021/04/impact-of-social-media-on-our-attent... “The average attention span in children is: 7 minutes for 2-year-olds; 9 minutes for 3-year-olds; 12 minutes for 4-year-olds; and, 14 minutes for 5-year-olds. Common estimates for continued attention to a freely chosen task range from about 5 minutes for a two-year-old child, to a maximum of around 20 minutes in older children and adults.”
19.) How EMF Exposure May Cause Depression, Anxiety & Other Mental Health Issues, Posted on May 10, 2022 by Daniel T. DeBaun: Engineer, Author & Telecommunications Executive https://www.defendershield.com/emf-exposure-depression-anxiety-mental-health-issues
