At our 2nd ACES (Aspiring Charter Executive Seminar) last night we learned about aligned curriculum and student achievement.
One thing we discussed was instructional alignment. S. A. Cohen argues that "the lack of excellence in american schools is not caused by ineffective teaching, but mostly by misaligning what teachers teach, what they intend to teach, and what they assess as having been taught."
K. T. Wishnick, another researcher, found that alignment accounted for more than 36% of the variance in performance on norm-referenced standardized tests. Altogether, the remaining variables--gender, SES (socioeconomic status), and teacher effect--accounted for little of the variance in student scores. Moreover, the alignment effect was more powerful for low achievers than for high achievers.
Showing posts with label student achievement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label student achievement. Show all posts
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Monday, April 30, 2012
The Classroom Teacher
1. Econometric analyses continually confirm that an effective classroom teacher is the most powerful in-school instrument currently available to propel student academic achievement.
2. An effective teacher [three] years in a row can set a student on a remarkably productive schooling trajectory and if all students were so fortunate as to have such a beneficial sequence of teachers the achievement gap between have and have not students would virtually disappear.
3. An ineffective teacher is the flip side. Three years in a row of an ineffective teacher is remarkably damaging to a student, often triggering a virtually irrecoverable lifetime learning deficit.
4. Terminating the lowest five percent of ineffective teachers and replacing them with teachers who are only average in effectiveness would of itself elevate U.S. achievement to among the highest in the industrial world.
5. United States public school teachers are more highly paid, on average, than those of OECD nations or Euro zone teachers.
6. When salaries are annualized, stretched over twelve months, and fringe benefits are included, U.S. teachers are paid more, on average than those in other occupations requiring comparable training.
7. U.S. Education school enrollees are among the lowest scorers on the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) and education school classes routinely award their enrollees the highest grades of any major in college.
8. No differences in student achievement gains can be discerned statistically between teachers who have obtained their pedagogical preparation through an education school or through a truncated alternative training route, such as Teach for America.
9. Turnover among beginning first and second year teachers is about the same as turnover among other professionals in fields requiring comparable training.
10. The greatest amount of gain in teaching effectiveness appears to occur during the initial three years of a classroom teacher's career. After that, gains to student achievement from teaching experience alone are quite low.
11. There is no consistently positive correlation between a teacher's accrual of advanced college academic credits and the achievement gains of his or her students.
12. Teachers holding a National Board of Professional Teachers Certificate display a slight positive advantage in terms of student achievement gains over those teachers not similarly certified.
James W. Guthrie is Nevada's superintendent of public instruction. This essay first appeared on the Nevada Department of Education Superintendent Blog.
2. An effective teacher [three] years in a row can set a student on a remarkably productive schooling trajectory and if all students were so fortunate as to have such a beneficial sequence of teachers the achievement gap between have and have not students would virtually disappear.
3. An ineffective teacher is the flip side. Three years in a row of an ineffective teacher is remarkably damaging to a student, often triggering a virtually irrecoverable lifetime learning deficit.
4. Terminating the lowest five percent of ineffective teachers and replacing them with teachers who are only average in effectiveness would of itself elevate U.S. achievement to among the highest in the industrial world.
5. United States public school teachers are more highly paid, on average, than those of OECD nations or Euro zone teachers.
6. When salaries are annualized, stretched over twelve months, and fringe benefits are included, U.S. teachers are paid more, on average than those in other occupations requiring comparable training.
7. U.S. Education school enrollees are among the lowest scorers on the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) and education school classes routinely award their enrollees the highest grades of any major in college.
8. No differences in student achievement gains can be discerned statistically between teachers who have obtained their pedagogical preparation through an education school or through a truncated alternative training route, such as Teach for America.
9. Turnover among beginning first and second year teachers is about the same as turnover among other professionals in fields requiring comparable training.
10. The greatest amount of gain in teaching effectiveness appears to occur during the initial three years of a classroom teacher's career. After that, gains to student achievement from teaching experience alone are quite low.
11. There is no consistently positive correlation between a teacher's accrual of advanced college academic credits and the achievement gains of his or her students.
12. Teachers holding a National Board of Professional Teachers Certificate display a slight positive advantage in terms of student achievement gains over those teachers not similarly certified.
James W. Guthrie is Nevada's superintendent of public instruction. This essay first appeared on the Nevada Department of Education Superintendent Blog.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Effective Professional Development
According to a Research Brief found at http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9526/index1.html traditional teacher qualifications such as years of experience and teacher educational level have little influence on student achievement.
Although I feel we need to consider this research which even supports Dr. Martin Haberman's STAR teacher theory I feel that it is still extremely important that our Esperanza educators continue to grow professionally. After all, who would want to go to a doctor, dentist, or any other professional who was not staying educated on the new state of the art findings. One of the problems in the education field is that teachers are often rewarded--higher pay and/or positions--based only on the fact that they have jumped through the right hoops, not that they have results because of applying what they have learned.
For these reasons we want to be extremely vigilant on how we design professional development for our Esperanza educators and how we reward them.
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