Talks

Conference Presentations, Seminars and Lectures

Event

World Education Summit 3.0, an international education conference

Date

February 16, 2023

Title

“Let’s stop mismeasuring schools’ vital signs, and start making errors visible.”

Format

MP4 (hosted on YouTube)

Duration

20 minutes

Overview

Is education the only profession where errors in judgment aren’t noted? In nursing, engineering, baseball, law, construction, aviation and cooking, people make mistakes. They become opportunities to learn. Why isn’t this true in education? How are those who teach, and those who manage them, supposed to improve if they are unable to learn from their mistakes? This talk is based on the book Mismeasuring Schools’ Vital Signs by Steve Rees and Jill Wynns. In his talk, Steve looks at the reported error rates in other professions, and asks why errors aren’t noted when teachers refer students to support teams for help, when they classify students as “ELs” who they believe to be not yet fluent in academic English, or when they fail to screen young students for dyslexia. You will find this brief talk to be a counterpoint to the simplistic advice to “just follow best practices.” Steve asks a different question: could improvement be more likely to result from a reduction in the error rate of teachers and administrators?

Event

National Center for Education Statistics STATS Annual Conference

Date

August 9, 2022

Title

“How a Multiple Measures Viz is Enabling One California District to Better Identify Struggling Readers and Inform the Debate Over How to Teach Reading”

Format

MP4 recorded webinar

Duration

About 60 minutes

Overview

District leaders have been telling teachers to use multiple measures for years. But how? We built evidence of emerging reading skills using all available evidence and showed two test results for each student at the same time, using a scatterplot. The purpose: to correctly spot the earliest signs of struggling readers and send the right students at the right time to Tier 2 support.

The challenge was to see if visual evidence could persuade adherents of a Balanced Literacy reading program to make big changes. Before we shared this new evidence, the Balanced Literacy advocates (a strong majority) and the Structured Literacy minority were accustomed to debating only pedagogy. When we brought them this rich evidence, their debate about its meaning shifted the conversation from arguments about principles to more practical questions like these: (a) if 40% of our 3rd graders are far behind grade level, shouldn’t we change how we’re teaching reading; (b) what use is the running record provided by our instructional program if the results are only weakly correlated to a more mature interim assessment; (c) can we improve the efficiency of referring struggling students to Tier 2 reading support?