I was just following a bunch of links on reopening the schools, and landed on this article:
"Reopening Primary Schools during the Pandemic" (Meira Levinson, D.Phil., Muge Cevik, M.D., and Marc Lipsitch, D.Phil.) (DOI: 10.1056/NEJMms2024920 [and may I say, the invention of the DOI system is one of the greatest gifts to mankind!])
In the article is this:
Furthermore, even when they are in the building, teachers may struggle
to teach and students may struggle to learn under rigorous social
distancing conditions. Young children cannot reliably maintain physical
distance, and teachers cannot simultaneously enforce distancing and
teach. In-person classes that require students to look straight ahead
and work independently (as many proposals for distanced classrooms
recommend) violate evidence-based good teaching practices.(17)
Knowing that looking straight ahead and working independently does
not violate
evidence-based good teaching practices, but only violates what teachers are erroneously taught in ed schools, I followed footnote #17 to...and opinion piece published in the Washington Post.
No evidence in sight!
"Perspective | The case against reopening schools during the pandemic — by a fifth-grade teacher" Authored by Valerie Strauss, but with the "Perspective" coming from fifth grade teacher Rose Levine.
Here's her "evidence-based" claims...oh, wait, she didn't give any! Just her perceptions and her "perspective" of her classroom:
Sharing a classroom allows our elementary cohorts to become like family.
We play games, exchange smiles, sit in circles on the rug and tell
stories. We taste each other’s food and whisper in each other’s ears. We
have casual exchanges during downtimes at recess or transitions between
subjects. We share supplies, collaborate and take turns, and in so
doing we build a model of accountability to one another and our
community.
Evidence!
This is my favorite part of the piece, where she's complaining about the physical distancing which would be required in reopened schools:
A student experiencing abuse at home can’t find a way to share that
information with a trusted adult without the whole class overhearing.
So, think about that one a little logically: a student is being abused at home, so we must keep them there, because at school they wouldn't be able to tell anyone about it. Okay...yeah, I don't get that one.
Then there's this, which is about the closest the article comes to the point the NEJM authors were using the footnote for:
Because we know that students learn best when they collaborate with
peers, discuss their thinking aloud, and experience instruction tailored
to exactly the skills they need to learn next.
How does Ms Levine know that? Because that's probably what she was taught in ed school and at every teacher's training session she's ever been too. In the ed world, student-centered classrooms are a given, and anything that contradicts that is an anathema.
The NEJM should have actually linked to another journal as evidence, if they could. But actual journal articles supporting student-centered learning are few and far between. The evidence is mostly on the other side. Which leads us to the arguments in the ed world about scientific studies being bad, because they don't say what they know to be true, and there are other ways of knowing, you know.
I find it astounding that this "perspective" was used to bolster a NEJM piece. A peer-reviewed, scientific journal, and one with a strong international reputation like the New England Journal of Medicine, should do better than a footnote linking to an opinion. Especially when they claim it's to "evidence".
But, then, NEJM authors aren't education experts, so a WaPo op ed sounded good enough to them.
Oh, wait, one of the authors is at the Harvard Graduate School of Education!
He should certainly have known better, and had at his fingertips the journal articles that would have actually supported his point. Huh. I find it interesting that he linked to an op-ed instead then. Maybe because the "evidence-based" science doesn't actually back his point. Which gets me back to ed schools teaching the wrong thing to our teachers.
Of course, that link weakened their case and made them look like twits to the one person in the entire world who would actually follow their footnote (Who? Me?)
When it comes to collaborative, student-centered,
constructivist-style teaching, I love what happened with the PISA exam
(PISA is a series of exams given internationally, and one of the only
ways to compare the educational systems in different countries.)
So
convinced were they that student-centered ed systems would do better, that they
announced they would track it.
Would schools that used old-fashioned,
lecture/response, sitting in neat little lines schools do worse than
energetic, project-based, collaboration-based, student-centered (no
lecture please!) systems?
When the evidence came back for the
traditional old way, they quickly dropped the subject and moved on. There's a lot of
moving on in the ed world.
(
Greg
Ashman's write-up of the PISA experiment.)
