Curios of the week #47

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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At the point where Port Philip bay begins to give way to the Bass Strait, lies Queenscliff Black Lighthouse. We spent a few days at Point Lonsdale last week, exploring the area, and one evening, we visited the lighthouse.

I do not know the story, but there is a fence separating the light house’s surrounds from the descent down into the bay and on that fence, people have placed padlocks memorisalising lost loved ones. What a curious little beautiful thing.

This week’s Curios include untrained teachers, a perceptive parent a superior education professor and much more.

Untrained teachers of the week

As a result of the pandemic, states in the US often resorted to bringing teachers into the classroom who had little or no traditional teacher training. Chad Alderman in The 74 is reporting on a set of evaluation of such teachers, compared against their trained colleagues, conducted in Massachusetts and New Jersey. The takeaway is that the untrained teachers seemed to be just as effective:

“Like other first-year teachers, those granted emergency credentials were disproportionately assigned to work with children with disabilities, English learners and low-income students. And, in fact, they had more such children in their classrooms. Even so, their students saw about the same rate of growth in math and reading as children taught by regularly licensed educators.”

Why were they disproportionately assigned these students? I don’t know, but it would be an interesting question to explore.

There were similar results for parents trained in structured literacy in Oakland:

“Parents with high school diplomas who were given 10 weeks of training on a structured literacy program helped students produce strong early literacy gains, roughly on par with those made under fully credentialed teachers.”

So, what is the value of teacher training? Anecdotally, it involves a lot of writing on butchers’ paper, a great deal of concern for social justice — even if the practical value of this concern does not move much past expression — and the promotion of teaching methods that lack evidence or are impractical, such as common approaches to differentiation.

Speaking of which.

Differentiation advocate of the week

Sometimes, I find myself quoted in an article without even being aware this was going to happen. Journalists can do so by referring to my blog.