Why Teachers Don’t Use the High-Quality Instructional Materials They’re Given? is a great question that serves as a headline to a recent The 74 column.
The author does provide an answer that partially answers it – because many of our students can’t access the supposed “grade-level” material present in it.
Another answer, of course, they just about every teacher knows, is because much of these supposed “high-quality instructional materials” just….suck. They’re not very engaging. As I’ve written before, It Doesn’t Matter If It’s “Effective” If Students Won’t Do It.
The author of the article, who isn’t a teacher, suggests that one of the parts of the solution could be pulling out students who need extra support and giving it to them.
I think that’s a valid point and, in fact, a recent study pointed out that providing that kind of effective extra support is critical for a successful schools (see Our School Has Three Out Of The Four Elements This Study Says Makes An “Effective” School).
But, bless his heart, he spends a lot of time arguing that schools need to do a ton more student assessments to make this kind of extra support effective.
Sigh.
No, we don’t need to give our students more tests.
What we need to do is structure the extra support differently (along with not using supposedly “high-quality” boring district-bought materials).
Personally, I think our school provided a model of this kind of effective extra support, though we had to abandon it because of budgetary issues.
It was a a very successful special intervention for Long Term ELLs that I think would work for English-proficient students, too. I taught twenty LTELLs for a period a day. Each week, all their content teachers (they were a cohort, though there were also other students in their classes) would send me a few bullet points saying what they were going to teach two weeks from that day, and what prior knowledge would be good for students to have.
I would do simple lessons (if I didn’t have any good ideas, we’d watch Brainpop movies and do different activities and games) during the week to help them acquire that needed knowledge. Then, when they would cover those topics in their content classes, they typically had more prior knowledge than their classmates.
It’s continues to be a bit perplexing to me why lots of schools don’t provide these kinds of classes but, of course, I am just a lowly teacher. What do I know?
Why Teachers Don’t Use the High-Quality Instructional Materials They’re Given? is a great question that serves as a headline to a recent The 74 column. The author does provide an answer that partially answers it – because many of our students can’t access the supposed “grade-level” material present in it. Another answer, of course, school reform Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…
