Eleven Other Things That Matter
- Learning to learn.
- Extracurricular activities (especially music) should be on offer: Kids who do extracurricular acitivities tend to do better in school than kids who don’t; the most consistent effect on academic performance is from students who do music or play in the school band; Kids who participate in extracurricular activities . . . are much less likely to do drugs, engage in sexual activity or get involved in other risk-taking behaviours; They’re also less likely to have self-esteem issues.
- Languages other than English should be part of the curriculum, especially if it’s a primary school: all (studies) consistently come to the conclusion that language instruction improves results in other areas, particularly maths; Importantly, many of the studies have revealed that children from low socioeconomic backgrounds received the greatest benefit from language studies when it came to improvements in other subjects. The reason appears to be that very few start studying a language with a head start, so suddenly the kids who thought they were crap at school discover a new confidence in their own academic ability.
- Effective use of technology will make a difference: The research has consistently shown that individual control over the pace at which the lesson proceeds is one of the key factors in computing being used successfully; the key benefits of technology used in the classroom appear to be its ability to provide immediate individualised feedback and to adjust its pace to the learning needs of the student; there’s no research to suggest any particular advantage in a child having exclusive use of a computer. The research overwhelmingly says that the optimum ratio for computers to students is one to two.
- Effective behaviour management is important: Teachers who deal effectively with disruptive behaviour get better results from the disruptors and everybody else. Classroom control of disruptive behaviour is one of he few overt signs of an effective teacher; if you really want to shut down disruptive behaviour, it’s clear (from the research) that the best thing to do is combine punishment with positive reinforcement; The clearest message from this research (and others like it) is that the most powerful deterrent and the most powerful incentive is communicating with the home.
- Homework policy doesn’t make a lot of difference:Because it’s such a focus for parental angst, there’s no shortage of research on every conceivable aspect of doing schoolwork at home. But the research in favour of homework is far from convincing, and the latest work suggests it’s a complete waste of everybody’s time; There were, however, modest benefits to high school students, in that those who did more homework tended to score better on standardised tests.
- Effective communication with parents matters a great deal: when parents know what’s being taught at school (and understand the edu-speak being used to teach it) they end up with very effective readers who race ahead of their peers; You (parents) need to establish an expectation that education matters and doing your best in school matters even more. Interestingly the same studies have found that other things about home life (e.g. having a place to study, rules about doing homework, restricting TV time) are irrelevant and have no impact on student outcome at all. Students who have high expectations of themselves are capable of managing their own time and are motivated to do it.
- Flipping the classroom: The thinking is that it’s best to use the teacher’s expertise where it will have the most effect. Not every child needs the teacher equally. Some kids will get some concepts straight away, will be able to breeze through the work and then consolidate it by helping others. Other kids will need direct coaching from the teacher. And that’s likely to be a much more effective use of the teacher’s time than lecturing to a class full of kids who are either bored or confused or both. When a child is trying to apply knowledge, they’re being deeply and profoundly tested. That’s when they need help to ensure they’ve understood key concepts and get immediate feedback if they haven’t. An interesting non-academic benefit has been that behaviour management referrals declined by 74 per cent in two years and that teachers are now reporting significantly greater job satisfaction. According to the principal, ‘Teachers feel good at night knowing they have done something positive for students. The flipped approach frees up classroom time so teachers can help students master topics, deepen relationships, and build critical thinking skills.’; a significant body of work suggests that each of the elements of flipped learning dramatically improves student performance (i.e. student-centred learning, peer tutoring, teacher feedback, and active instead of passive learning).
- You should avoid primary schools that don’t use phonics to teach reading: Theories on how to teach reading are almost as numerous as educational researchers, but in the last few decades they’ve formed up behind two main camps: the whole language adherents and the phonics crowd. Rote-learning letters and sounds might seem cruel and old fashioned, but on this the research is unequivocal. Phonics works and whole language doesn’t. Having parents just read to children at home has no significant effects (like volunteers reading at school), but if the reading is directed and coordinated with the reading lessons that are occurring in the classroom . . . it can have positive effects similar to those recorded for teachers. Silent reading . . . has no educational value whatsoever when it comes to teaching them to read.
- Children should not be streamed according to academic ability: Tracking does not deliver any academic benefit for any of the children. The kids in the high-performing group don’t do any better than they otherwise would and neither do the other kids. . . . tracking produces serious inequities in the schools that use it.
- But you should look for a school that ‘accelerates’ if your child is gifted: The studies on acceleration show profound benefits for gifted kids; When researchers have gone looking for these downsides, they’ve almost universally come up empty-handed on social and interpersonal development measures.
- If your child has special needs, you should know exactly what resources are available: All Australian schools in all sectors are required by law to make reasonable educational adjustments for students with a disability so that they can participate in schooling on the same basis as students without a disability; real advantages lie in socializations benefits. In mainstream classes, disabled children learn to interact with non-disbaled peers and vice versa. And as long as the teacher is appropriately trained . . . and has appropriate assistance . . . there’s no impact on the academic performance of other children in the class; The research also suggests that the presence of a disabled child will likely improve social skills in the remainder of the class (in that they’re more likely to be accepting of significantly different ability levels than would otherwise be the case).
Conclusion
- The perfect school will have a highly effectively leader who engages the community and teachers alike, who mentors those teachers and gets the very best from them no matter what their innate ability. It will have a teaching culture of continuous learning. Teachers will approach their task not as underpaid glorified child care but as an opportunity to improve their skills and their students’ outcomes. And the perfect school may do absolutely nothing else.
- A truly extraordinary school will have both of these characteristics and a few more bells and whistles. It will provide a music program and it will teach at least one foreign language. It will teach children how to learn rather than just what to learn. It will use technology to ensure students have immediate feedback and teachers have the time to help those who need it most. Homework won’t be a priority but the school will work very hard at keeping parents in the educational loop. It won’t stream students academically, but it will accelerate the truly gifted and will definitely not rely on whole language as a means of teaching literacy.
- We are streaming our entire education system. Federal funding of independent and Catholic schools follows the stampede to fee-paying schools and diverts money from the cash-strapped public schools that need it the most. This creates a multi-tiered system that not only entrenches disadvantage at the bottom but weakens the entire system. Streaming is a disaster within schools because it produces inequity that harms everybody . . . The outcome is exactly the same for the whole Australian education system: high levels of inequity, social division, residualisation (the creation of schooling ghettos) and worse outcomes for everybody.
- A poor system pulls down performance in all sectors. A good education system is a tide that raises all boats . . . It’s in our interests . . . to consider the whole system, not just our child within it.
- We need all our teachers to be professionals . . . and we need a school system designed to ensure that only professionals are interested in joining and staying . . . In the meantime, parents need guidance without marketing.
- Learning to learn.
- Extracurricular activities (especially music) should be on offer: Kids who do extracurricular acitivities tend to do better in school than kids who don’t; the most consistent effect on academic performance is from students who do music or play in the school band; Kids who participate in extracurricular activities . . . are much less likely to do drugs, engage in sexual activity or get involved in other risk-taking behaviours; They’re also less likely to have self-esteem issues.
- Languages other than English should be part of the curriculum, especially if it’s a primary school: all (studies) consistently come to the conclusion that language instruction improves results in other areas, particularly maths; Importantly, many of the studies have revealed that children from low socioeconomic backgrounds received the greatest benefit from language studies when it came to improvements in other subjects. The reason appears to be that very few start studying a language with a head start, so suddenly the kids who thought they were crap at school discover a new confidence in their own academic ability.
- Effective use of technology will make a difference: The research has consistently shown that individual control over the pace at which the lesson proceeds is one of the key factors in computing being used successfully; the key benefits of technology used in the classroom appear to be its ability to provide immediate individualised feedback and to adjust its pace to the learning needs of the student; there’s no research to suggest any particular advantage in a child having exclusive use of a computer. The research overwhelmingly says that the optimum ratio for computers to students is one to two.
- Effective behaviour management is important: Teachers who deal effectively with disruptive behaviour get better results from the disruptors and everybody else. Classroom control of disruptive behaviour is one of he few overt signs of an effective teacher; if you really want to shut down disruptive behaviour, it’s clear (from the research) that the best thing to do is combine punishment with positive reinforcement; The clearest message from this research (and others like it) is that the most powerful deterrent and the most powerful incentive is communicating with the home.
- Homework policy doesn’t make a lot of difference:Because it’s such a focus for parental angst, there’s no shortage of research on every conceivable aspect of doing schoolwork at home. But the research in favour of homework is far from convincing, and the latest work suggests it’s a complete waste of everybody’s time; There were, however, modest benefits to high school students, in that those who did more homework tended to score better on standardised tests.
- Effective communication with parents matters a great deal: when parents know what’s being taught at school (and understand the edu-speak being used to teach it) they end up with very effective readers who race ahead of their peers; You (parents) need to establish an expectation that education matters and doing your best in school matters even more. Interestingly the same studies have found that other things about home life (e.g. having a place to study, rules about doing homework, restricting TV time) are irrelevant and have no impact on student outcome at all. Students who have high expectations of themselves are capable of managing their own time and are motivated to do it.
- Flipping the classroom: The thinking is that it’s best to use the teacher’s expertise where it will have the most effect. Not every child needs the teacher equally. Some kids will get some concepts straight away, will be able to breeze through the work and then consolidate it by helping others. Other kids will need direct coaching from the teacher. And that’s likely to be a much more effective use of the teacher’s time than lecturing to a class full of kids who are either bored or confused or both. When a child is trying to apply knowledge, they’re being deeply and profoundly tested. That’s when they need help to ensure they’ve understood key concepts and get immediate feedback if they haven’t. An interesting non-academic benefit has been that behaviour management referrals declined by 74 per cent in two years and that teachers are now reporting significantly greater job satisfaction. According to the principal, ‘Teachers feel good at night knowing they have done something positive for students. The flipped approach frees up classroom time so teachers can help students master topics, deepen relationships, and build critical thinking skills.’; a significant body of work suggests that each of the elements of flipped learning dramatically improves student performance (i.e. student-centred learning, peer tutoring, teacher feedback, and active instead of passive learning).
- You should avoid primary schools that don’t use phonics to teach reading: Theories on how to teach reading are almost as numerous as educational researchers, but in the last few decades they’ve formed up behind two main camps: the whole language adherents and the phonics crowd. Rote-learning letters and sounds might seem cruel and old fashioned, but on this the research is unequivocal. Phonics works and whole language doesn’t. Having parents just read to children at home has no significant effects (like volunteers reading at school), but if the reading is directed and coordinated with the reading lessons that are occurring in the classroom . . . it can have positive effects similar to those recorded for teachers. Silent reading . . . has no educational value whatsoever when it comes to teaching them to read.
- Children should not be streamed according to academic ability: Tracking does not deliver any academic benefit for any of the children. The kids in the high-performing group don’t do any better than they otherwise would and neither do the other kids. . . . tracking produces serious inequities in the schools that use it.
- But you should look for a school that ‘accelerates’ if your child is gifted: The studies on acceleration show profound benefits for gifted kids; When researchers have gone looking for these downsides, they’ve almost universally come up empty-handed on social and interpersonal development measures.
- If your child has special needs, you should know exactly what resources are available: All Australian schools in all sectors are required by law to make reasonable educational adjustments for students with a disability so that they can participate in schooling on the same basis as students without a disability; real advantages lie in socializations benefits. In mainstream classes, disabled children learn to interact with non-disbaled peers and vice versa. And as long as the teacher is appropriately trained . . . and has appropriate assistance . . . there’s no impact on the academic performance of other children in the class; The research also suggests that the presence of a disabled child will likely improve social skills in the remainder of the class (in that they’re more likely to be accepting of significantly different ability levels than would otherwise be the case).
Conclusion
- The perfect school will have a highly effectively leader who engages the community and teachers alike, who mentors those teachers and gets the very best from them no matter what their innate ability. It will have a teaching culture of continuous learning. Teachers will approach their task not as underpaid glorified child care but as an opportunity to improve their skills and their students’ outcomes. And the perfect school may do absolutely nothing else.
- A truly extraordinary school will have both of these characteristics and a few more bells and whistles. It will provide a music program and it will teach at least one foreign language. It will teach children how to learn rather than just what to learn. It will use technology to ensure students have immediate feedback and teachers have the time to help those who need it most. Homework won’t be a priority but the school will work very hard at keeping parents in the educational loop. It won’t stream students academically, but it will accelerate the truly gifted and will definitely not rely on whole language as a means of teaching literacy.
- We are streaming our entire education system. Federal funding of independent and Catholic schools follows the stampede to fee-paying schools and diverts money from the cash-strapped public schools that need it the most. This creates a multi-tiered system that not only entrenches disadvantage at the bottom but weakens the entire system. Streaming is a disaster within schools because it produces inequity that harms everybody . . . The outcome is exactly the same for the whole Australian education system: high levels of inequity, social division, residualisation (the creation of schooling ghettos) and worse outcomes for everybody.
- A poor system pulls down performance in all sectors. A good education system is a tide that raises all boats . . . It’s in our interests . . . to consider the whole system, not just our child within it.
- We need all our teachers to be professionals . . . and we need a school system designed to ensure that only professionals are interested in joining and staying . . . In the meantime, parents need guidance without marketing.