Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it.
Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise.
I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing. I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. Indeed, reviewing the content of those exams appears pressing.
Instead of testing students on material with no empirical backing, state departments of education could provide a useful service by scouring the required licensing exams that test knowledge of instructional methods and removing content without a sufficient evidence base. Both test developers and teacher educators have a responsibility to stay up-to-date on research regarding learning and instruction. What they choose to include in course syllabi and on licensure tests is more than a statement about what the field of education believes future teachers ought to learn.
It is also a statement about how much the field values empirical knowledge. Sign in. Log into your account. Forgot your password? Privacy Policy. Password recovery. Recover your password. Get help. Education Next. Latest Issue. William Furey. The Link to Licensure To reveal the extent of this problem, I, with the help of undergraduate students studying to become certified teachers, first reviewed the requirements for licensure and certification to work as an elementary-school teacher in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Coursework Corrections Teacher educators and preparation-program administrators should not want to propagate a myth that has negative effects on student achievement and motivation. William Furey is assistant professor at Manhattan College. Last updated April 7, William Furey Author Bio. Many songs were imperfect, forgettable, unrecognizable. But he released his work to the world consistently, and I imagine he got better with time.
Can they, too, publish? At Scroll, the faculty give the students general directions and let them loose. Many are freshmen writing something real for an audience other than the teacher and TA for the first time, and their imperfect, published attempts fall short. Several classes and groups on this campus produce work for audiences other than the teacher and TA.
Will there be others? One course creates brochures for state agencies, for mental health advocates, and for law enforcement in our own city. Could that same police officer benefit from an interpersonal communication course, where she could explore non-verbal cues and learn to de-escalate conflicts quicker?
Could a group of mothers in the community serve as an ongoing focus group for a nutrition or business marketing course? The possibilities are endless. Spence writes:. Many students and faculty would engage in learning activities off-campus. Citizens, managers, and public officials, in turn, might frequently be seen on campus to participate in design teams, as coaches and as learners.
This is already happening in small ways, but I believe it must become the norm if any university is to remain viable. Lest we forget how obsolete we as a faculty could quickly become, we should remember that Youtube, Wikipedia, and Khan Academy already exist. Spence continues:. Their experience exposes traditional classrooms as academic dust bowls.
The problem is that many American elementary schools aren't doing that. The basic assumption that underlies typical reading instruction in many schools is that learning to read is a natural process, much like learning to talk.
But decades of scientific research has revealed that reading doesn't come naturally. The human brain isn't wired to read. Kids must be explicitly taught how to connect sounds with letters — phonics.
But this research hasn't made its way into many elementary school classrooms. The prevailing approaches to reading instruction in American schools are inconsistent with basic things scientists have discovered about how children learn to read. Many educators don't know the science, and in some cases actively resist it. The resistance is the result of beliefs about reading that have been deeply held in the educational establishment for decades, even though those beliefs have been proven wrong by scientists over and over again.
Most teachers nationwide are not being taught reading science in their teacher preparation programs because many deans and faculty in colleges of education either don't know the science or dismiss it.
As a result of their intransigence, millions of kids have been set up to fail. Even though Silva had known little about how children learn to read or how reading should be taught, he'd long been aware that some older students were struggling too. He'd been a middle school and high school teacher for years, and he had students who came across words they'd never seen before and had no idea how to sound them out.
Kim Harper, the district's supervisor of literacy, noticed the same thing. She'd been a high school English teacher in Bethlehem and said that a disturbing number of her students, even students in honors classes, weren't very good readers. They would tell me it was too hard. She didn't know what to do about it either, so she more or less shrugged it off.
You know, we're always going to have X percent of kids who it's just going to be a struggle for,'" she said. Even the school board president, Mike Faccinetto, said it was pretty much accepted that a lot of kids in the district would never be very good readers.
The kids who weren't doing well, "'Ah, well, you know those kids, their parents aren't around, or maybe they don't have two parents. And that's the best they're going to do.
Silva wanted to figure out what was going on. So in , he assigned Harper to visit all of Bethlehem's elementary schools and find out how children were being taught to read. Harper went to a professional development day at one of the district's lowest-performing elementary schools.
The teachers were talking about how kids should attack words in a story. When a child came to a word he didn't know, the teacher would tell him to look at the picture and guess. The most important thing was for the child to understand the meaning of the story, not the exact words on the page. So, if a kid came to the word "horse" and said "house," the teacher would say it's wrong. But, Harper said, "if the kid said 'pony,' it'd be right because pony and horse mean the same thing.
Harper was shocked. First of all, pony and horse don't mean the same thing. Second, the idea that you look at pictures and guess when you don't know a word seemed odd to her.
There were no pictures in the books her high school students read. The teachers described their approach to reading instruction as "balanced literacy.
Frankelli was the district's new supervisor of early learning. Though her teaching experience and training were in the upper grades, too, she'd been a principal at one of Bethlehem's elementary schools.
She said it hadn't been completely clear to her what balanced literacy was. The main idea seemed to be: Give kids lots of good books, and with some guidance and enough practice, they become readers. The scientific research on reading goes back decades, from work psychologists were doing in the s to more recent discoveries by neuroscientists using brain imaging technology. Researchers have been doing their work in labs that were sometimes right across the quad from schools of education, but reading researchers and education researchers kind of live in separate universes; they go to different conferences, publish in different journals.
The big takeaway from all the scientific research on reading is that learning to read is not a natural process. We are not born wired to read. We are born wired to talk. Kids learn to talk by being talked to, by being surrounded with spoken language.
That's all it takes. No one has to teach them to talk. But, as numerous studies have shown, reading is different. Our brains don't know how to do it. That's because human beings didn't invent written language until relatively recently in human history, just a few thousand years ago. To be able to read, structures in our brain that were designed for things such as object recognition have to get rewired a bit.
Another big takeaway from decades of scientific research is that, while we use our eyes to read, the starting point for reading is sound.
What a child must do to become a reader is to figure out how the words she hears and knows how to say connect to letters on the page. Writing is a code humans invented to represent speech sounds. Kids have to crack that code to become readers. Children don't crack the code naturally. They need to be taught how letters represent speech sounds. But by the time scientists had done all the studies to conclude this for sure, a different set of beliefs about reading was already deeply entrenched in many American schools and colleges of education.
Debates about reading go back centuries. In the s, Horace Mann, the father of the public-school movement in the United States, railed against the idea of teaching children that letters represent sounds. He referred to letters of the alphabet as "bloodless, ghastly apparitions" and argued that children would be distracted from comprehending the meaning of what they were reading if they focused too much on letters. He believed children should be taught to read whole words.
On the other side of the debate were people who believed in phonics. That means teaching children that words are made up of parts and showing them how different letters and combinations of letters connect to the speech sounds in words.
No one really knew how children actually learned to read, or how they should be taught.
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