How Kids Learn Better By Taking Frequent Breaks Throughout The Day

Like a zombie, Sami—one of my fifth graders—lumbered over to me and hissed, “I think I’m going to explode! I’m not used to this schedule.” And I believed him. An angry red rash was starting to form on his forehead.

Yikes, I thought, what a way to begin my first year of teaching in Finland. It was only the third day of school, and I was already pushing a student to the breaking point. When I took him aside, I quickly discovered why he was so upset.

Throughout this first week of school, I had gotten creative with my fifth grade timetable. If you recall, students in Finland normally take a fifteen-minute break for every forty-five minutes of instruction. During a typical break, the children head outside to play and socialize with friends.

I didn’t see the point of these frequent pit stops. As a teacher in the United States, I’d usually spent consecutive hours with my students in the classroom. And I was trying to replicate this model in Finland. The Finnish way seemed soft, and I was convinced that kids learned better with longer stretches of instructional time. So I decided to hold my students back from their regularly scheduled break and teach two forty-five-minute lessons in a row, followed by a double break of thirty minutes. Now I knew why the red dots had appeared on Sami’s forehead.

Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure if the American approach had ever worked very well. My students in the States had always seemed to drag their feet after about forty-five minutes in the classroom. But they’d never thought of revolting like this shrimpy Finnish fifth grader, who was digging in his heels on the third day of school. At that moment, I decided to embrace the Finnish model of taking breaks.

Once I incorporated these short recesses into our timetable, I no longer saw feet-dragging, zombie-like kids in my classroom. Throughout the school year, my Finnish students would, without fail, enter the classroom with a bounce in their steps after a fifteen-minute break. And most important, they were more focused during lessons.

Why we need SC members who will stand up against unreasonable data collection!

Teachers Go Public With Their Resignation Letters

By Brenda Iasevoli on April 14, 2017 7:11 PM

Scripted lessons, an oppressive testing culture, and a punitive evaluation system are the main reasons teachers are heading for the exits, according to analyses of their resignation letters. Now a new study examines how the letters have risen into the realm of social action.

"The reasons teachers are leaving the profession have little to do with the reasons most frequently touted by education reformers, such as pay or student behavior," said Alyssa Hadley Dunn, a co-author of the new study on "I Quit" letters and assistant professor of urban teacher education at Michigan State University. "Rather, teachers are leaving largely because oppressive policies and practices are affecting their working conditions and beliefs about themselves and education."

The authors of "With Regret: The Genre of Teachers' Public Resignation Letters" set out to understand how teachers' writing aims to make a difference in an an education system they view as broken. The study analyzes 22 letters written by educators from 13 states between 2012 and 2014, and with experience ranging from one year to 40 years. What emerges is a veritable style of writing expressing disillusionment with the teaching profession and the aims of the education system. (You can also read Education Week Teacher blogger Walt Gardner's assessment of why teachers quit here. Gardner taught for 28 years in Los Angeles and was a lecturer in the UCLA Graduate School of Education. And here is a first-person account of why a teacher in her sixth year has decided to leave the profession.)

In the past five years, U.S. teachers have increasingly shared their resignation letters online—in blogs, on Facebook, Youtube, and on local and national news sites—where the missives have gone viral. These letters come from novice and veteran teachers of all subjects and grade levels, in urban and suburban settings all across the country. Linking these letters is the view that education in the United States is headed in the wrong direction, and that the best course of action is to leave the classroom and let the public know why.

Teachers often write of feeling complicit in a broken system, and that leaving was a way of taking a stand. One teacher writes: "I quit because I'm tired of being a part of the problem. It's killing me and it's not doing anyone else any good."

That sentiment informs the central component of the teacher resignation letter: a description of what's wrong with U.S. education today. Gerald J. Conti, a social studies department leader in the Westhill Central School District in Syracuse, N.Y., offers a case study. The 40-year veteran cites many reasons for his exit, not the least of which is what he sees as an overreliance on "data-driven education" that "seeks only conformity, standardization, testing, and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core . . . ."

Like the other letter writers, Conti expresses feelings of abandonment by a profession which, as he says, no longer trusts teachers to create their own quizzes, and then eats away at their planning time by making them prepare lessons and other materials for review. "After all of this, I realize that I am not leaving my profession; in truth, it has left me," he writes. "It no longer exists."

Still others express defiance. One teacher writes: "I am quitting without remorse and without second thoughts. I quit. I quit. I quit!" His reason: He feels the profession forces him to preside over a barrage of tests "for the sake of profit."

The study's authors conclude that resignation letters provide teachers with a platform for questioning the policies that shape education, while also educating the public about its problems. Taken as a whole, the "I Quit" letters describe the state of U.S. education, build empathy for teachers who work in the system, and provide a call to action to fix what is wrong in public education.

For an alternative view of the "I Quit" letter phenomenon, check out Justin Minkel, who says these "gloomy tales of departure" deserve a response from career educators who find the teaching profession worthy of a lifetime of dedication. Minkel is a 2nd and 3rd grade teacher in Arkansas who frequently writes for Education Week Teacher.

34 problems with standardized tests

By Valerie Strauss April 19 at 12:57 PM

In March I wrote about a decision by three justices on a Florida appeals court that said that a standardized reading test is the best way to decide whether third-graders should move to fourth grade — not actual school work or grades.

The case involves a Florida law that says that students who fail a third-grade language arts test can’t move on to the fourth grade (though some exemptions are made). While the policy has not been shown to have a lasting benefit to students, Florida and other states maintain it anyway.

Some third-graders — including honors students — from a number of school districts were denied promotion because they opted out of the test. The parents of those students, who are part of a national testing opt-out movement, went to court and sued their districts. In August, Leon County Circuit Court Judge Karen Gievers ruled that those school districts that had refused to promote the students had been wrong. The case was appealed and the 1st District Court of Appeal overturned her ruling, saying:

The purpose of the ELA is to assess whether the student has a reading deficiency and needs additional reading instruction before (and after) being promoted to fourth grade. See § 1008.25(5)(a). The test can only achieve that laudable purpose if the student meaningfully takes part in the test by attempting to answer all of its questions to the best of the student’s ability. Anything less is a disservice to the student — and the public.

That ruling ignored years of research that shows that high-stakes standardized test scores are not reliable or valid, and it ignored the problems Florida has had with its standardized testing accountability system, which became so severe that school superintendents statewide revolted in 2015 and said they had “lost confidence” in its accuracy.

Here’s a look at all the things standardized tests can’t do, by veteran Florida educator Marion Brady, who has written history and world culture textbooks (Prentice-Hall), professional books, numerous nationally distributed columns (many are available here), and courses of study. His 2011 book, “What’s Worth Learning,” asks and answers this question: What knowledge is absolutely essential for every learner? His course of study for secondary-level students, called “Connections: Investigating Reality,” is free for downloading here. Brady’s website is www.marionbrady.com.

More towns tell students: It’s time to play

By Jennifer Fenn Lefferts GLOBE CORRESPONDENT APRIL 12, 2017

Elementary school students in Medway are now spending an extra 10 minutes a day outside for recess, a move parents and school officials hope will lead to improved social and emotional growth.

The change from 15 to 25 minutes started just after the February break, and came about 18 months after a group of parents began lobbying the district for more unstructured play time.

Lab Rats for America, A Kafkaesque Version of Our Future

By dianeravitch, August 22, 2016

Peter Greene writes here about a polished (and terrifying) video released by the ACT Foundation that portrays the programmed education of the future.

He begins:

Oh my God. Oh my effing God.

If you want to see where Competency Based Education, data mining, the cradle to career pipeline, the gig economy, and the transformation into a master and servant class society all intersect– boy, have I got a video for you. Spoiler alert: this is also one way that public education dies.

I’m going to walk you through the video, embed it for your own viewing, and tell you about the people behind this. Hang on. This is stunning. And I’ll warn you right up front– this is not some hack job that looks like amateur hour video production (like, say, an in house USED video). This is slick and well-produced. Which somehow makes it more horrifying.

The video is a little SF film taking us ten years into the future. Imagine you are one of the one billion people using a new technology called The Ledger. And our slogan…?

Learning is earning.

Peter patiently walks you through this dystopian vision of the future of training, disguised as “education.”

He writes:

Exactly what task will certify that you have acquired one hour’s worth of critical thinking?

And how do we even begin to discuss the notion that it doesn’t really matter whether you learn quantum physics from a PhD in the field or from a person who once sat in one class taught by that PhD?

And does anybody think that this is how the children of the wealthy will be educated? Will they accept this sort of “education”? Will they accept this total violation of data privacy?

This is not education. This is training. This is operant conditioning for the servant class that also provides the upper class with tools that let them trickle even fewer benefits down to the working class.

In fact, I would say that this is just training rats to run a maze, but it’s even worse than that, because ultimately even if we were to accept the premise that simply giving some job-ish training for the underclass is good enough, and even if I were to accept the racist, classist bullshit that somehow ignores the immoral and unethical foundations of such a system, the fact remains that this would be a lousy training system. To reduce any job of any level of complexity to this kind of checklist-of-tasks training provides the worst possible type of training.

So, no, this isn’t even sending rats into a maze to earn a pellet of food. This is carrying the pellet dispenser with you as an app. This is saying, “Well, the maze just involves twelve left turns and seven right turns.” Then I hand the rat a tiny phone with an app that measures his ability to turn corners, and once the rat has turned twelve left corners and seven right ones, the app spits out a food pellet.

This is also, not incidentally, the death of public education for any but the wealthy. In the world of the Ledger, there are no teachers, no schools, and no education for any purpose other than to satisfy the requirements of the people with power and money. In the world of the Ledger, education training exists only to help workers better react to the demands of employers. There is no benefit to education training except to trade for money. The Ledger is the wet dream of every corporate boss who said, “Why are they wasting time teaching these kids all this extra stuff. I’m not gonna pay them for that.”

It is important to know what the futuristic thinkers have in mind for us and our children, whether their vision will expand our ideals or contract them. This is most certainly the latter.