First National Study on American Elementary Classrooms after NCLB

In today's keynote, Stephanie also introduced this article published in Science about the quantity and quality of instruction and the relationship between teachers and students in American elementary classrooms. It is the first national study of its kind after the implementation of NCLB.


Here are a few highlights important to look at:

• The study is based on direct observations of first, third, and fifth grades in 1000 elementary schools and 400 school districts.
• In fifth grade, children spent most of their time (91.2%) working in whole-group or individual-seatwork settings. Students spent little time (7%) in small-group instruction (two to five students).
• In fifth grade, 37% of instruction was in literacy and 25% was in math; in first and third grade, more than 50% of instruction was in literacy and less than 10% was in math.
• Very little instruction or classroom activity was given in technology.
• Few opportunities were provided to learn in small groups, to improve analytic cal skills, or to interact extensively with teachers.
• Typically, over the course of a 20-minute period, instruction involved only one method or mode (e.g., vocabulary worksheet or watching the teacher do math problems).
• Teachers most of the time gave generic feedback on correctness rather than encouraging extension of student performance or discussing alternative solutions.
• Classroom dynamics were not related to teachers’ degree status or experience.

The most surprising finding for me is the ineffective elementary-level teacher education in the U.S. Being at an educational institution as prestigious and progressive as TC let me ignore an important fact that not only that no child should be left behind but also no teacher should be left behind. On one hand, the national DOE and a number of professors in higher educational institutions keep proposing that all K-12 teachers should have master's degrees. However, on the other hand, the quality of teacher education programs is doubtful. The spread of higher educational degrees doesn't mean a spread of high-quality teaching. The findings of this article imply that the quality of teaching, the allocation of instructional periods across subjects, and the classroom climates created by the U.S. teachers are not satisfactory at all.

The unbalanced instructional periods across subjects imply that our elementary teachers either ignore or are lack of confidence in teaching subjects such as science, math, and technology. Even within the relatively larger trunk of literacy instructional, teachers spend too much time in drill and basic teaching such as asking students to fill in blanks and doing multiple choices instead of helping students look for meanings within texts.

Prof. Calkins mentioned in the first-day keynote: "the access to a good teacher is the most likelihood that can increase children’s success." It seems that our teacher education and professional development are not influential and in-depth enough. I wonder how many schools are actually applying TC's literacy teaching approaches? what are the percentages in NYC and the nation at large? How to make this project be more widely accessed and how to revolutionize the teacher education programs in a large number of universities?

Furthermore, under this new digital age, to cater to students' needs for 21st-century skills, our literacy teaching should not be limited to traditional static texts. As Prof. Calkins argued, today's children are growing up in an age of blogs, wikis, videos, games, etc. We as teachers should keep ourselves updated to the changing outside world. Literacy teaching can happen with comic books (e.g., The Comic Book Project), Twitter (e.g., community writing contributed by thousands of children around the world), videos (e.g., use video conversation tool VoiceThread to make textual/video/audio/visual comments to a video story), classroom blogs and wikis, etc. We should know how to appropriately use technologies to bridge children's literacy learning and their 21st-century skills.