Dealing with “side effects” of educational interventions

We’re pretty lucky in education – this post is rarely relevant. Unlike doctors, we often don’t have to worry about the things we do causing harm. Sure, things may not be effective, but rarely do we actually risk hurting kids with what we do.

“Ability groups” or “skill groups” (terminology differs depending on who you’re talking to) are one of those perennial educational topics that never quite die. Like punishment and charter schools, folks have deeply passionate & entrenched perspectives about putting kids in groups based on what they can do, and what they need to learn. As a brief point of clarification, here’s what we’re NOT talking about:

• Tracking: Keeping kids in whole classes, and even educational tracks, based on their ability.

• Temporarily pulling kids aside and providing a little extra instruction to kids who may need it.

In reality, we’re talking something sort of in between (though probably closer to the latter). Most (elementary) educators are pretty familiar with “guided reading groups” or similar small group format instruction. This is what we’re talking about – routine, ongoing instructional settings in which kids participate based on what they need to learn.

I’m not going to go extensively into this topic and talk about all the research supporting or not supporting the skill group as a concept. To hopefully suffice, consider that many thousands of research studies were conducted with kids participating in a small group of some nature. By default, while this does NOT support that simply convening in a skill group is effective it most certainly supports that skill groups can be an effective instructional condition. On the other hand, sometimes skill groups are done ineffectively. For example, teachers may have lower expectations of students in lower groups (not just expecting lower results, which would make sense since their skill level is lower, but lower expectations given relative performance levels). Teachers may also keep kids in those skill groups too long, not moving kids up or down as need be. In short, some of these (inappropriate) uses of skill groups can cause problems.

First, to be clear, these side effects do NOT appear to universally be present in all instances of skill groups, but only when skill groups are done in certain, non-ideal, ways. But, let’s just pretend they were always present. At the same time, they work for us in certain ways – they let us differentiate learning, monitor individual performance more closely, give relative performance feedback more swiftly and accurately, and so on. In short, the benefits can be huge, which leads me to the fundamental question at hand:

How do we, as educators, use interventions or strategies that may actually impart some harm to students?

Do we cross them off the list entirely? Ignore the side effects? Something in between. After all, if doctors refused to use any treatment with side effects, we’d have no cancer therapy, no anything really.

My own personal answer is that I think we have to balance the potential gains versus the risks, and make an informed decision. Just because skill groups may, under certain circumstances, lead to a few negatives, doesn’t mean we discount the concept entirely. What it does mean:

1) We should attempt to understand the side effects & the conditions in which they occur, then attempt to minimize their occurrence and magnitude.

2) We should weigh the benefit versus the potential risk. With something as huge as skill groups, we should be sure to weight the benefits more substantially. We may be willing to stomach more side effects if the benefits are that much better. As another example, consider special education for a child who is significantly behind – there are some pretty serious side effects, but some pretty serious risk that comes with doing nothing as well.

3) We should consider alternatives. For example, punishment has side effects. While we shouldn’t, therefore, dismiss punishment entirely, we should consider other ways of taking care of business. For example, differential reinforcement of alternative behavior (DRA) is a concept from behavioral psychology that basically pulls a fast one and switches up reinforcement for punishment. Pretty slick, a with a few less consequences.

4) We should inform key stakeholders, including the kids themselves. Not only does this build ownership & sustainability into the intervention, but it can (at times, though not always) mitigate the risk of side effects as kids may be able to stomach them a little better if they come from within. This means that kids who are involved in making decisions may not feel as much like things are happening to them, and they may better understand why the side effect is happening.

5) We should collect data & monitor progress, not only with the outcome, but with the side effects. If we think placement in a skill group is going to cause emotional stress, let’s monitor emotional stress in a data-based fashion. Let’s know what we’re up against & what we’re dealing with.

As educators, we like to strictly dichotomize and characterize things. Things are often either awful or great. The next best thing, or a complete waste of time. Find me someone who doesn’t love or hate charter schools, someone who doesn’t have a strong opinion on corporal punishment. In reality, and I hate to say this, but corporal punishment isn’t all bad. Charters aren’t all good, but 17% of them beat out public schools. Hmmm. Rarely are things as easy and neat as we want to make them. It’s our job as professional educators to not jump on bandwagons and be popular scientists with educational research. We have a duty to our kids to live in the grey areas research often leaves us; to wade in the murky waters of empiricism and best practice; to make professional, data-based decisions in the face of uncertainty.

So, with side effects, treat them as one part of the equation – one thing to be considered.

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Cautionary note on our New Years’ resolutions

It’s beautiful January in our fair land and that means a few things – resolutions are in full gear, and folks (educators included) are in search of the “latest” and “newest” to implement in the spirit of new beginnings. That’s all well and great, seriously – I love change & progress more than most, but take it from someone who maybe loves it a little too much: Sometimes, it’s better to just stick with what you’ve got.

Here’s what I mean: If you’ve given something (say, a new small group reading intervention) a try for a while now and it’s not working, let your New Years resolution mentality kick-in and change it up. However, education is hard, and sometimes the long-road is the right road. And, sometimes, that road is boring. When the road gets boring, we can convince ourselves that things like resolutions and overhauls are the way to go.

In fact, education is fraught with examples of jumping on the latest and greatest, only to discontinue what we were doing last year. Last year, maybe we dumped a ton of money and PD time into direct instruction. That didn’t fix everything, so now we aren’t really doing that much, and have jumped on single-gender education. After a year, that probably won’t fix everything, so maybe we’ll become enamored with year-round education, or charters, or maybe we’ll put balanced literacy back in the rotation.

All tongue-and-cheek commentary aside, let’s realize that what we do is hard. We aren’t going to teach everything, fix everything, or inspire everyone. And when we do, we might not even know it, or know it for a long time. So, let’s embrace progress and always be on the lookout for what else we can do better, but not at the expense of building on what we already have.

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Red Beans & Rice

With life in general, it seems I’ve been traveling a curvilinear path starting with simplicity, then toward complexity, now back to simplicity. My mid-20s were all about how many ingredients I could put in a dish – I fancy I could make it. I had something to prove, apparently. Now, I’ve come to re-appreciate the value of simplicity, in large part because I think simplicity allows food to speak more clearly and be less cluttered. More ingredients are okay, but they each need to mean something to the dish. Conceptually, it’s the same thing – it’s okay to get fancy, as long as fancy means something.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from fancy is red beans & rice. A New Orleans tradition since way back when, red beans & rice fall into utilitarian and comfort food categories we’ve created to nostalgically reminisce about more simple times of the past. It’s doubtful that nearly as many people need to spend all day Monday tending house, a task chain that originally necessitated the simple meal that would become rice & beans, but what we do need to is to remember the time when we did need to spend Mondays in that way. Somehow it connects us with our past, our history.

Red Beans & Rice has also become more than just a way to remember the past, but an excuse to get together as a group. A huge pot of Red Beans & Rice is tough to eat by oneself, even spread out over the course of a week. By fixing a pot, we create the need for community – for people to come over and share a dish. So, on this Monday, I raise my glass to you, Red Beans & Rice.

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Battery Replacement (Motobatt)

I was oh-so-excited to pull out of my garage recently only to discover that wasn’t an option. I turned the key to the “on” position, but alas – a tiny bit of turnover, but not enough to get it going. I was a bit bummed at first, then started to see it like I see most everything else in the “it’s broken” category – an opportunity to get handy. So, I got online, did some research, and ordered a battery. It came in, I installed it, and voila – now she runs! While I can’t say what I did was hugely difficulty, it did give me a slight confidence boost – the feeling that, if something does go wrong, maybe – just maybe – I can fix it!

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Racial isolation & student achievement – which is actually better?

In the United States, the history & struggle for racial integration of schools has largely been a social & political issue. Seldom has the question been raised, “In which setting do students actually do better?” Sarah Sparks at Education week reports on folks trying to answer this question, and draws the conclusion that “racial isolation” is worse for students of color. I don’t dispute the findings, or disagree with them. However, I wanted to present a bit of my own data analysis to present a slight twist on this perspective.

I’ve worked with youth in several, somewhat large, Southern school districts, and found an interesting trend: Black students in predominantly White schools actually tend to do worse. I’m basing this observation of relative performance on state and national tests, reported by state departments of education, available online. Where I’ve noticed this trend particularly is in schools with around 30-50% Black students, and in which those students come from highly impoverished areas in which school districts split up areas of concentrated poverty by sending students to different schools. This trend seems to be left over from a bygone area in which neighborhood schools were redistricted so that Black, poor residents from a single neighborhood didn’t all end up going to the same school.

Take this for what you will. I’ve come up with a few hypotheses as to why this may be happening, but my main point of this blog post is not to advocate for racial isolation, segregation, etc., but to make the point that just because we value something doesn’t make it good. We may like the idea of Black & White students attending schools together, but does such racial integration actually lead to greater levels of academic achievement? Here’s an even more interesting question: For purposes of social justice & morality, would we be okay with racially integrated schools even if they did worse? In other words, would our priority for “doing the right thing” trump results? Still, put another way, could the means justify the end? These are questions I don’t have the answer to, but certainly like to think about.

So, while not the main point of this post, I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least briefly bring in my thoughts on why racially integrated schools may not do as well. In short, my thoughts center around two hypotheses. First, greater academic heterogeneity may be impeding teacher effectiveness during whole group instruction. When teachers have students with a much wider range of skills in a classroom, it’s harder to design instruction which meets the needs of all students. In most of the schools I looked at, the Black students came from lower wealth backgrounds, and as a result often lower levels of incoming academic achievement. Higher diversity with SES lead to higher diversity with beginning academic achievement. By contrast, when students attend school with students of similar SES status, academic achievement may be more homogeneous, helping teachers plan effective whole group instruction that meets the needs of more students in the classroom.

Second, discipline: different groups of people tend to have different approaches to discipline, which means that when those kids get to school, teachers may experience different levels of success with certain disciplinary approaches with different types of students. Again going with the homogeneity argument, when you have students from similar demographic backgrounds, you’re more likely to be able to find a consistent classwide & schoolwide disciplinary approach that will work for more students. Contrast that with a school with a lot of different types of students with different disciplinary needs – an approach devised for 70% of the school may not work with the other 30%.

A lesser, though potentially valid, hypothesis is with teacher self-selection of location. In short, teachers tend to choose the schools they work in, and tend to choose those schools for particular reasons. Teachers who choose to work in schools with a population of 70% White students from wealthier backgrounds may not as likely gravitate toward Black students from lower wealth backgrounds. I realize this is grossly exaggerated, and in no way encompasses all teachers, but those of us who have worked in schools have most likely had conversations with fellow educators about preferences in terms of who we work with.

Again, the take home here isn’t any one particular conclusion, just that our values & common sense aren’t necessarily the best predictors or indicators of outcomes.

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Succumbing to Trend – the Yarai mixer

I probably fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum in terms of trend consumption. Sometimes I rail against tend, sometimes I silently acquiesce and hope no one notices :). Often, the line for me is function over form – if the choice is between something not trend and functional, and something trendy but just as functional – sure – I’ll go trendy. I might even spend a few more dollars to get there!

Enter the Yarai mixer. There’s no real function to this mixer, at least more than incidental benefit – it does cool cocktails a bit more effectively, and allow you to preview what you’re making before you serve it, but at the end of the day (or cocktail prep, as it were) – the cocktail is going to taste & look, essentially, the same. Why, then, did I decide upon a Yarai mixer for my latest purchase? Well, I guess this time trend won!

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Fall Riding is Here!

Pretty excited that Fall is here, even if it really isn’t yet. Make no mistake – this photo is clearly not in my neighborhood, because none of the leaves are changed. However, the winter helmet is out and in use, so that means foliage is just around the corner. Looking forward to riding!

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