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Studying Teacher Moves
A practitioner's take on what is blocking the research teachers need
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In July 2011, Bill Gates told the Wall Street Journal, "I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts…. I'm enough of a scientist to want to say, 'What is it about a great teacher?'"
As a "practitioner" of sorts, I've wondered the same thing for 15 years. The K–12 school sector generates little empirical research of any sort. And of this small amount, most is targeted to policymakers and superintendents, and concerns such matters as the effects of class size reduction, charter school attendance, or a merit-pay program for teachers. Why is there virtually no empirical education research meant to be consumed by the nation's 3 million teachers, answering their questions?
Those 3 million teachers generate about 2 billion hour-long classes per year. We do not know empirically which "teacher moves," actions that are decided by individual teachers in their classrooms, are most effective at getting students to learn. Why doesn't this kind of research get done?
Mr. Gates has part of the answer. Money. For 2011, the Microsoft R&D budget is $9.6 billion, out of total revenue in the $60 billion range. The U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES) represents only a fraction of total education research, but its budget gives some perspective: IES spends about $200 million on research compared to more than $600 billion of total K–12 spending. So, 15 percent to upgrade Microsoft, 0.03 percent to upgrade our nation's schools. And while Microsoft's research is targeted to the bottom line ($8.6 billion is on cloud computing, the profit center of the future), IES spends almost nothing examining the most important aspect of schools: the decisions and actions that individual teachers control or make.
One IES project is the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), established in 2002 to provide "a central and trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education." The WWC web site lists topic areas like beginning reading, adolescent literacy, high school math, and the like. For each topic, WWC researchers summarize and evaluate the rigor of published studies of products and interventions. One might find on the WWC site evidence on the relative effectiveness of middle-school math curricula or of strategies to encourage girls in science, for example.
But there is almost nothing examining the thousands of moves teachers must decide on and execute every school day. Should I ask for raised hands, or cold-call? Should I give a warning or a detention? Do I require this student to attend my afterschool help session, or make it optional? Should I spend 10 minutes grading each five-paragraph essay, 20 minutes, or just not pay attention to time and work on each until it "feels" done?
And the WWC's few reviews of research on teacher moves aren't particularly helpful. A 63-page brief on the best teaching techniques identifies precisely two with "strong evidence": giving lots of quizzes and asking deep questions. An 87-page guide on reducing misbehavior has five areas of general advice that "research supports," but no concrete moves for teachers to implement. It reads, "[Teachers should] consider parents, school personnel, and behavioral experts as allies who can provide new insights, strategies, and support." What does not exist are experiments with results like this: "A randomized trial found that a home visit prior to the beginning of a school year, combined with phone calls to parents within 5 hours of an infraction, results in a 15 percent drop in the same misbehavior on the next day." If that existed, perhaps teachers would be more amenable to proposals like home visits.
By contrast, a fair number of medical journals get delivered to my house. They're for my wife, an oncologist. They're practical. In each issue, she learns something along these lines: "When a patient has this type of breast cancer, I currently do X. This study suggests I should do Y." There is a bit on medical policy, but most of the information is meant for individual doctors in their day-to-day work.
That's not to say that we shouldn't conduct research on education policy. My own work has certainly benefited from it. For example, the quasi-experimental study by economists Tom Kane and Josh Angrist on Boston charter schools, which compared the winners and losers of charter admission lotteries, helped change the Massachusetts law that had blocked the creation of new charters. The change enabled me to help launch a new charter school, MATCH Community Day. My point is simply that relative to education policy research, there is very, very little rigorous research on teacher moves. Why? Gates knows it's more than a lack of raw cash; it's also about someone taking responsibility for this work. "Who thinks of it [empirical research on teachers] as their business?" he asked. "The 50 states don't think of it that way, and schools of education are not about [this type of] research."
I agree, but I contend there are a number of other barriers. The first is a lack of demand.
Why aren't teachers clamoring for published research? One reason is that researchers generally examine the wrong dependent variable. Researchers care about next August (when test scores come in, because they can show achievement gains). Teachers care about that, too, but they care more about solving today's problems (see sidebar, page 26).
A second issue is that researchers don't worry about teacher time. Education researchers often put forward strategies that make teachers' lives harder, not easier. Have you ever tried to "differentiate instruction"? When policy experts give a lecture or speak publicly, do they create five different iterations for their varied audience? Probably not.
The return on investment for teacher time and the opportunity cost of spending it one way rather than another is rarely taken into account. In what other, valuable ways could teachers be spending the time taken up with building "differentiation" into a lesson plan? They could phone parents, tutor kids after school, grade papers, or analyze data. Much research implies that teachers should spend more time doing X while not indicating where they should spend less time.
Teachers don't trust research, and understandably so. There's a lot of shoddy research that supports fads. Experienced teachers remember that "this year's method" directly contradicts the approach from three years ago. So they'd rather go it alone. Newer teachers pick up on the skepticism about research from the veterans.
Unlike medical research, teacher research rarely examines possible side effects, and whether they are short-term aggravations or can be expected to persist. Imagine that a teacher reads an article arguing that students benefit from being asked "higher-order questions." She begins doing that. Some students, surprised at this new rigor, are frustrated. Some students throw up their hands and give up. Misbehavior ensues.
Student frustration is probably a fairly predictable short-term side effect of asking higher-order questions. If she isn't being properly warned, a teacher might quickly abandon this technique.
For all these reasons, the 3 million teachers aren't forming picket lines to demand research.
Neither policy camp, reformers nor traditionalists, care much about research into teacher moves, either. Some traditionalists see teaching as an art, one that cannot be subjugated to quantitative analysis ("every teacher is different"). Others aren't averse to research; they simply don't see it as a priority. They'd prefer that limited resources be used to fight poverty, not to improve students' day-to-day classroom experiences.
Meanwhile, some reformers argue "we already know what works," and we just need to scale it.
As part of the "reformer" community, I find this troubling. From charter opponents like Diane Ravitch to supporters like education secretary Arne Duncan, there's agreement that "some charter schools work." Furthermore, there's strong evidence that the charters that succeed tend to be "No Excuses" schools. So do we know what works?
I'm the founder of one of those charter schools; our high-school students have the highest value-added gains of all 340 public high schools in Massachusetts. I'm also the founder of a small teacher residency program that supplies teachers to schools like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program). Many of us would agree to a very different proposition: We know teacher moves "that work" to some extent, enough to create very large achievement gains, but we don't know teacher moves well enough to get our college graduation rate near where we'd like it to be. Nor do we know how to help teachers do these moves more efficiently, so that their jobs are sustainable.
Without a massive uptick in our knowledge of teacher moves, we'll continue on the current reform path. That path is a limited replication of No Excuses schools that rely on a very unusual labor pool (young, often work 60+ hours per week, often from top universities); the creation of many more charters that, on average, aren't different in performance from district schools; districts adopting "lite" versions of No Excuses models while pruning small numbers of very low performing teachers; and some amount of shift to online learning. Peering into that future, I don't see how we'll generate a breakthrough.
Bridging the Divide
The final barrier to research on teacher moves is the divide between practitioners and researchers. My analogy is a 5th-grade dance. Boys stand on one side. Girls stand on the other. There is very little actual dancing. In this case, teachers are off to one side, and quantitatively oriented researchers are on the other.
After a while, the boys go into the hallway and talk about video games. Similarly, quantitative researchers find the transaction costs of setting up experiments are too high and give up on doing research about teacher actions. They take their problem-solving marbles and find other data sets to crunch.
Girls see that the boys aren't around anymore. So they dance with each other. Teachers and school leaders, if they like to learn, do so through observation of and conversation regarding perceived "best practices." There aren't many practitioners who care about rigorous empirical research.
With all these barriers, is there much hope? There's not going to be a pot of gold in this funding environment. If research on teacher moves matters, we need to be more creative about catalyzing the low-hanging fruit. That would mean identifying practitioners who are unusually interested in randomized research, and connecting them with doctoral students who are unusually interested in teachers and teaching.
What does it look like when practitioners and researchers dance together? Here is one example.
In July 2010, I asked Harvard economist Roland Fryer for some help. My research question was fairly simple: Do teacher phone calls to parents "work"?
In our school, teachers proactively phone parents. Typically, the parents have not been heavily involved in their children's previous schools. We believe that phone calls to parents help teachers generate improved decorum, effort, and ultimately learning from students. (Sometimes the calls to parents are supplemented with teacher calls to students) These parent relationships seem to be linked to very high parent-satisfaction ratings, and in turn we have thought those were related to our high test-score growth. Truth be told, however, we just don't know whether this is a productive use of teachers' time.
Fryer enlisted two doctoral students, Shaun Dougherty and Matt Kraft, from the Quantitative Policy Analysis in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. These two did an amazing job, operating skillfully within our school to do the randomized study. From their findings:
"On average, teacher-family communication increased homework completion rates by 6 percentage points and decreased instances in which teachers had to redirect students' attention to the task at hand by 32%."
This collaboration worked for several reasons. First, we have a teacher residency embedded in our charter school, so I had 24 student teachers who could be fairly easily randomized during the summer school session. Second, a professor I trusted chose the graduate students who would conduct the research. These guys were, in my view, dispassionate. I've tried to work before with grad students who have strong preexisting beliefs about what they'll find (typically with a "progressive" lens), and it was difficult to gain real knowledge. (Researchers often feel the same way about practitioners, that we're searching for marketing, not truth). Also, Fryer paid them a stipend; in my experience, graduate students working for free, and only for credit of some sort, don't always follow through.
The cost of the two graduate students was not the only expense. In our experiment, at any given time, there were 16 classrooms in action. The researchers needed to hire 16 observers to carefully code student behavior for a few weeks. The total bill was around $10,000. Kraft and Dougherty found a Harvard grant of $1,000. The rest I needed to pay.
Once we'd designed the experiment, I needed to explain it to my team: the principals of our high school and middle school, and the student teachers who were involved. These are people I know well, and they generally trust me. Still, this buy-in phase required expending both time and "relationship capital," a resource that gets spent down and must be built back up over time. Using student teachers was also of benefit. It would have been tough to randomize our regular teachers. Their belief in the efficacy of parent communication is so strong I suspect many would have doubted the value of changing their normal routines.
There were other costs to the experiment. The head of our teacher-prep program spent many hours handling the experiment's complex logistics, including a permission slip for parent consent. He could have spent those hours coaching these student teachers, which is the main task I was paying him to do.
All of these issues reflect transaction costs: finding the right people and then doing the right study well takes time, effort, and money.
Think of the Human Genome Project. When the project started, scientists didn't know how many genes there were; now they believe the number is 20,000 to 25,000.
We don't know how many teacher moves there are. The number is certainly high but not infinite, maybe 200, 2,000, nobody knows. Presumably, there are some unusually high-yield teacher moves across all contexts, some moves that are high yield but only in specific situations or contexts, and other less powerful moves. There is undoubtedly lots of interaction effect among many moves. Mapping all of this might be called the Teaching Move Genome Project, and at the beginning it would be a scary undertaking.
Absent this work, what do we have? Perceived best practices, often buttressed by observation or nonrandomized studies. In his best-selling book Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov describes 49 teaching moves he has observed in the nation's top charter schools. At the University of Michigan, Deborah Ball and her colleagues are close to unveiling a list of 88 math teacher moves. Lee Canter's Assertive Discipline and Jon Saphier's Skillful Teacher discuss scores of moves, like the "10-2" rule (have kids summarize for 2 minutes in small groups after 10 minutes of teacher-led instruction), much of it supported by nonrandomized research. On the basis of its observations of effective teachers, Teach For America (TFA) promotes 6 teacher behaviors and 28 component parts, like "plan purposefully" or "set big goals"; none are specific moves.
What would a series of randomized trials look like? Let's apply it to Lemov's 49. Imagine a group of trials that would ask the questions, Do all of the moves work? Are any particularly successful? How does the degree of teacher buy-in interact with effectiveness? What are the "costs" of these moves?
An example from Lemov is "Right Is Right." The idea is that when a kid gives an answer that is mostly right, the teacher should hold out until it's 100 percent correct. Lemov describes various tactics the teacher can use to elicit the 100 percent right answer from the student (or first from another student, before having the original student repeat or extend the correct answer).
The obvious cost of implementing this move is time. These back-and-forths add up to lost minutes each period when other topics are not being discussed. A less skillful teacher might be drawn into a protracted discussion, when her next best alternative (simply announce the 100 percent right answer, and move on) might work better. We just don't know.
Back in 2003, education researchers David Cohen, Stephen Raudenbush, and Deborah Ball argued that "one could make accurate causal inference about instructional effects only by reconceiving and then redesigning instruction as a regime, or system, and comparing it with different systems." That suggests "a narrower role for survey research than has recently been the case in education, and a larger role for experimental and quasi-experimental research. But if such studies offer a better grip on causality, they are more difficult to design, instrument, and carry out, and more costly."
Still, we need a better grip on causality. So who would undertake this cost?
Once again borrowing some terminology from medicine, I propose a typology of trials, delineating phases in a continuum.
Phase 1 trials would be small, nongeneralizable empirical studies of teacher moves. These could be randomized, single-subject, or regression discontinuity, but the dependent variable would not be year-end test scores. Instead, we'd look for next-day or next-week outcomes: measurable effects on student behavior, effort, or short-term learning.
Who would decide what moves to test? Some would be proposed by established authors and thinkers in the teaching field. Some would come from the nation's 3 million schoolteachers, possibly with crowd sourcing to identify the most-promising ideas. Some would come from academic researchers, particularly those from other fields, like psychology, who may offer unusual insights. But for the next level, testing competing ideas, I'd suggest we draw heavily on teacher opinion, particularly a group of teachers selected for their stated willingness to try new methods (if they are supported by research).
Phase 2 trials would test promising teacher practice from Phase 1 on a larger, more varied teacher pool to see if the next-day outcomes held up, probably across different types of schools. Again, the dependent variable is short-term student response.
Phase 3 trials would be randomized trials in which teachers combine multiple moves that emerge from Phase 2. In the end, our bottom line is student learning, and Phase 3 trials are combinations of moves that are measured to see if they bolster year-end student learning gains.
Medical researchers have found that treating some illnesses requires a drug "cocktail," that is, no one medicine by itself works as well as the combination of several. The same approach might work in education: it could be that individual teacher moves by themselves cannot create measurable year-end achievement gains in students, but combining many together can.
My proposal is that each of the nation's 1,200-plus schools of education and teacher prep programs conduct one randomized trial on a teacher move each year: Phase 1, Phase 2, or Phase 3. They'd do that by recruiting alumni into a network of experienced teachers willing to participate. The advantage is that once you pay the one-time transaction costs of finding these teachers, the ongoing expenditures related to persuading them to participate, and securing permission from families and principals, decline.
Once that network existed, it would function like a laboratory. Various Phase 1 experiments could be run through it, with small numbers of teachers at first, so that many experiments could be run concurrently. Larger numbers of teachers would be included in more promising Phase 2 validation experiments. Of course, there would be selection bias in terms of which teachers are willing to be participate in this sort of work, and other imperfections. But in the end, experiments could build on proven results from previous ones. Multiple ed schools would combine their networks for Phase 3 trials.
By itself, no single experiment would be that important. Instead, it would be like cancer research: thousands of people each trying to answer small questions in a very rigorous way…which would add up to promising treatments.
The goal is an affordable system for conducting teacher research that teachers would actually consume, that would address both the implementation challenges and the high transaction costs for researchers and practitioners in creating such research. Until that exists, I'll see you at the 5th-grade dance.
Michael Goldstein is the founder of MATCH Charter School and MATCH Teacher Residency, in Boston.
Comment on this article
Good article. I kept telling my college professors that the process of education has not change much in 3000 + years. There is an instructor who instructs and a student who learns. The methodology is really the only thing that has changed.
Terrific article here! The meager investment in R&D in education is a huge reason why research is not finding its way to practitioners. But establishing dynamic two-way partnerships between practitioners and researchers is also essential. The new regional educational laboratories that will be unveiled in a couple of months will focus big time on research alliances as suggested in the article. Thanks for writing this article.
Great article, Mike, and not much I disagree with. But to play devil's advocate for a moment, I do wonder if one of your main contentions — that we need to study "teacher moves" — is consistent with other professions, at least outside of medicine. I practiced law for seven years and I'm hard pressed to think of a single time I ever consulted a legal periodical to learn a new "lawyer move." And before you scream "that's because lawyers are paid by the hour and therefore inefficiency is rewarded!", I worked for the government for half the time, so that can't be the entirety of the reason. And I personally think teaching more closely resembles lawyering than it does doctoring — although all three involve the art of instruction, only the practice of medicine is undergirded by hard science.
Education has become to complicated. Simplify. 1. Define success. I would think it would have to be connected with serving others and happiness. Of course serving others invariably leads to happiness. 2. Consult retired teachers. There is nothing second to experience. 3. View the student and parents as customers. 4. Inspire. I would say that should be a number one objective in education. 5. Anticipation. Anticiapation is now lost for the children regarding reading. The myth -the younger the better to educate is false. Children are no longer given the advantage of waiting for the great day to read and have a math workbook…..Make them wait and make it sound so grand that when they are all ready and all can succeed, about 8 or 9, let them Read!!!!!!! The waiting will motivate them. Of course we read to them daily and make them love great literature. 5. Decide what is important to American education. Such as worthy home membership, vocation, and citize ship. 6. Teach the truth of the founding of our nation…google David Barton. 7. Cultivation of personal and social interests.8. Prieomote good health. 9. Command of fundamental processes. (3 Rs) 9. Promoting ethical character. INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES in students and the varied needs of society must be taken into consideration and honored. I enjoy eating out much more than going to a doctor or lawyer. What if a student chooses food service. Yeah….google successful people that did not go to college. Just becasue we educators went to college does not mean that not going is a sin. SIMPLIFY….As far as evaluations go…evaluate backwards…parent and student evaluate all. Teacher evaluate principal, after all the principal is serving teacher and students and parents. Principals, teachers, parents, and students evaluate supt., the supt. serves each of these. We have things backwards. As far as teacher moves go……love, inspire, pray, care, indiviualize, guide gently, value students and parents, listen. It is a matter of effectiveness when your students are embraced by these things. Seriously, love those we serve. Simplify. Teacher moves- find the gift each child possesses. Testing…..Albert Einstein…We are all a genius. We must not judge a fish by how well he climbs a tree. He will think he is stupid he entire life….We teach the fish also. Honor them. Test for college ready only, kills the fish. Value their talents also. Love to all.
Thanks Paul.
Jim — look fwd to the unveiling.
Ben — for the gov't lawyers, inefficiency is required, not rewarded. Ba dum dum. There actually is some interesting empirical research on jury selection. But I'll trust your judgment on that profession.
Perhaps one way to call the question is this. Let's set aside analogies to lawyering. If you were teaching 7th grade math, and there existed research on teacher moves that you felt was empirically strong, would you try those moves?
And even if not: would you object to colleagues who did covet and use that research (while you continued to simply trust your gut on all decisions)?
In terms of your research, was all the research done at a charter school? Because a call from a charter school about student behavior would presumably be more effective than a call from a public school. Charter schools can give kids the boot (or "counsel out") more easily.
Furthermore, homework completion in and of itself isn't anything unless it improves demonstrated performance (which is a big deal in math). Did it improve test scores?
Because that, too, is one of the big problems in researching "what works". There's lots of supposed proxies for performance, particularly homework and engagement, that don't necessarily improve performance.
Thanks for this thought provoking article – most of which I agree with. However, I think an important aspect of teaching has been omitted. Knowing your students well and how they learn best is a critical way to improve learning outcomes, but is difficult to research. All students are individuals, as are teachers, and the complex interactions and dynamics in every classroom cannot be quantified easily. Teaching is an art, as well as a science.
Hi Cal,
Thanks for the good questions/observations.
1. To your first Q, yes. As I mention above, all studies in a single site are inherently limited. (Not just charter v. public. Any School A is diff from School B).
Hence need for a Phase 1 trial (single site) to be followed by Phase 2 trial (across various types of schools).
2. Totally agree on dependent variable. Hence need to take promising practices from Phase 1/2 to see if they affect student achievement in Phase 3.
Which, btw, is what my wife does with cancer research. You try some stuff on cells in a dish, or with mice. Those are proxies for what might work with humans.
It's valuable to learn about the proxies, but as you say, that's not the end goal. Just part of the process.
3. Just FYI. Phone calls to parents are common in many traditional schools, too. See this Edweek column, for example.
Also perceived as highly effective. Are they actually effective? I say: Let's test empirically.
Great article.
For those who are interested – the preliminary results of the phone call experiment at MATCH have been slightly updated. I am including the abstract below and a link to the full paper.
The Effect of Teacher-Family Communication on Student Engagement: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment
In this study, we seek to evaluate the efficacy of teacher communication with parents and students as a means of increasing student engagement. We estimate the causal effect of teacher communication by conducting a randomized field experiment in which 6th and 9th grade students were assigned to receive a daily phone call home and a text/written message during a mandatory summer school program. We find that frequent teacher-family communication immediately increased student engagement as measured by homework completion rates, on-task behavior and class participation. On average, teacher-family communication increased the odds a student completed their homework by 42% and decreased instances in which teachers had to redirect students' attention to the task at hand by 25%. Class participation rates among 6th grade students increased by 49%, while communication appeared to have a small negative effect on 9th grade students' willingness to participate. Drawing upon surveys and interviews with participating teachers and students, we identify three primary mechanisms through which communication likely affected engagement: stronger teacher-student relationships, expanded parental involvement, and increased student motivation.
The entire paper can be downloaded from this site:
I particularly liked the way 'Teacher moves" were spoken about in this article. It brought me back to the days when I studied the work of Jon Saphier in the "Skillful Teacher." For anyone not familiar with this work, you might be surprised by the amount of work completed on this subject that has received minimal attention in the education circles.
Jon and his colleaques primarily work in Massachusetts and many disciples can be found in the schools. However, again, why this body of knowledge about teaching has not been used and distributed, is baffling.
It may be worth someone's time, resurrecting this work and introducing it to a broader national audience.
I'm a teacher. (you can google an article written by Jay Mathews about a graduate from a top-ranked ed school circa July 2009; that's me). I have credentials in math, english, and history, and teach algebra II (no trig) and geometry at a Title I school in the Bay Area. I count homework as a minimal part of the grade, give students the higher of their test average or test/classwork/homework, whichever is higher. Most of my students don't do homework. I didn't even assign homework for the last semester, when I taught algebra. I'm seeking a balance between getting kids to think about math for 30 minutes a night or after school, to get more of a memory, without making this behavior a factor in their grade.
In my experience, phone calls home have zero effect. In public school, they are necessary CYA and little more. I prefer email, and often have good conversations with parents on email about their students. But it's not a behavior or academic game changer–just a good way to exchange info.
On the data–I wasn't criticizing your data per se, as opposed to the entire mindset behind most educational research. We are extremely reluctant (for obvious reasons) to correlate incoming ability with outcomes. But we're very eager to correlate behavior that we just rilly rilly want to have some sort of impact (calling home, involving parents, and so on).
This is a thoughtful and smart look at the kind of research that may improve the practice of teaching.
Yes, yes, yes!
Michael, thanks for your work in this arena. The coordination you recommend is not just needed but possible! What of the idea to staff at the school level to administer such trials? As school information systems become increasingly sophisticated and cloud-based, I could see our traditional "Registrar" position transforming into a kind of "Data administrator."
Thanks, again. Onward!
You touch on an issue that must be addressed before true improvement can be achieved within our education system, and that's providing teachers with realtime access to data that effects learning. The technology tools to put meaningful data in the hands of teachers and students, in realtime, are becoming more plentiful each and every day. The technologies behind this potential game changer, e.g., cloud, mobile, and HTML5, are only beginning to make their way into use, let alone education. I can only hope and trust that the research needed to answer the questions about what constitutes 'best practice' will immediately follow access to the data. Then and only then will we have the capacity to sustain improvements made within our education system. This leads me to reflect on the wisdom of Ron Edmonds, a researcher best known for identifying the characteristics of effective schools when he said: "We can whenever and wherever we choose successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us. We already know more than we need in order to do this. Whether we do must finally depend on how we feel about the fact that we haven't so far." ~ Ron Edmonds, 1983.
Given technology tools, realtime access to data, ongoing research, and our longstanding traditions embedded in current education policy and culture, we have a very long way to go! As a concluding thought, I share with you two question that continue to shape my career. How do you feel about the fact that we haven't succeeded at educating all children? and; What are you willing to do about it? Your answer will determine our future.
As a teacher, I would love to be part of and build this network. Best practice research usually feels like it's done to the teachers instead of by the teachers. Also, professional development offerings rarely dives into which teacher moves are most effective in which contexts. This teacher research network could shift both paradigms into one where teachers are active participants in improving the knowledge base of their profession and where there is very granular data about which teacher moves are effective in what kind of contexts (by population of students, past behavior of students, student age, learning goal, etc.).
I am absolutely with you on the basic idea here. I wonder about one thing. In the comment update on the results of the study, it described the experimental group getting daily phone calls home as well as a text/written message daily. I'm wondering about the usefulness of this data, then — I too perceive phone calls home as helpful, and would love to know if that's true. But I'm thinking about phone calls home at a MUCH lower frequency – I have 70 students and can't imagine calling for even half of them every single day, no matter how effective that might be. Again, this seems to fall into the trap of ignoring teacher time. In the few cases where, for whatever reason, I have a very close and strong relationship with a student's family and we talk on anywhere approaching a daily basis, yes, I see an impact on the student. But this is not the same thing as "Do teacher phone calls have an impact?" — again, unless the point of the study is to look at drastic interventions for extremely high-need students.
Thanks for the note. Two thoughts. One is about calls. The other is about experiments.
In our charter school, teachers have about 80 students. So they typically reach a few per day by phone. It adds up.
If we had the experimental world I described, we'd never expect "too much" info from a single study. With 3 million teachers, it's not too much to expect that the researchers do a few per year on each key topic, which aggregate to 30 to 50 in a decade per topic.
Examples from what you wrote – what is effect of heavy phone calls in Sept (to build relationship) and then "maintenance" calls and texts. Can calls increase essay writing completion, not just behavior? What is return on reaching 10 parents versus, say, same amount of time running a help session after school? Can a teacher's high-dosage calling "flip" her most disruptive student (ie, a text each morning, a call each night, for a month)?
[…] ineloquent as I. There are a few tools that I have found reliable (maybe even worthy to be called teacher moves?) in helping students express themselves, even if it is only in entirely confusing, muddled […]
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May I interject that there are studies on teacher moves. They are not done by universities but by private industry. Groups like Time to Teach, Quantum Teaching, Brain Based Teaching etc. Are not government funded and do not publish papers to be reviewed by colleges and universitites. Instead they spend time in classrooms at all levels and work with classroom teachers, quantify data, and present methods that work to teachers that take the time to invest in their training. I have invested a significant sum in my post college training to increase myclassroom moves and create a better learning environment. School systems are not interested in spending money on teacher training that is not funded by the local, state, or federal authorities. These bodies will not look at teaching methodology that does not flow from Universities more the loss for American Education.
There is research on teacher behavior which has been done in science and in particular in physics. There is now a whole branch of physics called PER (Physics education research) but their findings are generally ignored in schools. There are also training programs that change teacher behaviours. One of them is Modeling at ASU, and it has a huge effect on student learning. Why is Gates ignoring methods and research that actually works when there is good rigorous research that can be applied. Another program which has large benefits is Thinking Science by Shayer, Adey& Yates which also changes teacher behavior and at the same time improves student ability to think. Their work was published in the early 90s but is unknown in the US.
This work changes basic teacher behaviors while not burdening them with more requirements. The teachers thing differently about how to teach, and get much better results. Why nibble at small changes like 3% improvement in homework, when you can get 30 to 70% gain instead of the usual 10% gain in conventional classes. These figures have bee observed in numersous PER studies.
I did a study last spring as part of a graduate education course on what factors went into the success of Finland's schools. While there are many cultural factors that cannot be exported to this country (we're not Finnish!), one factor I found intriguing was the move to train teachers to be educational researchers. In our country we have the "5th grade dance" divide between researchers and practitioners. In Finland the educational community does significant research with the findings informing practice (they also do not use high stakes testing, but that is another discussion). Japan similarly empowers their teachers as researchers with Lesson Sudy. It seems in these countries the Ed research dance works much more like it should.
One thing in the article I find vague is the term 'teacher moves'. What costitutes a teacher move? Can effective teaching be reduced to a set of 'moves'? The most important research that has impacted my teaching came out of physics education research (modeling instruction), which had identified a coherent set of practices (like the medical cocktail analogy) that makes a measurable difference in student understanding. However, it is different enough from traditional practice that teachers need training and sustained practice to make the shift rather than just reading about it. Cherry-picking 'moves' from the overall practice dilutes its effectiveness. For the research effort to make a difference the effective practices (a word I prefer over 'moves', since effective teaching is usually a set of synergistic 'moves') need to find their way into teacher preparation and on-going professional development.
Focusing on "teacher moves" misses the central issue in teacher effectiveness. Teaching is not a set of moves. Rather, teaching METHOD is the most important factor in student learning!
The sit-and-get method (i.e., teaching is telling and learning is listening) is ineffective. Two examples illustrate this.
1. Physics education research of David Hestenes at Arizona State University. Modeling Instruction in K-12 science was developed from his research. Student achievement is typically double that of conventional instruction. instead of relying on lectures and textbooks, Modeling Instruction emphasizes active student construction of conceptual and mathematical models in an interactive learning community. Students are engaged with simple scenarios to learn to model the physical world. Models reveal the structure of the science and are sequenced in a coherent story line. They form a foundation for problem-solving and they guide projects. For more information, please contact firstname.lastname@example.com. http://modeling.asu.edu
2. The TIMSS 1999 Video Study of Stigler and Hiebert. It supports principles of Modeling Instruction. This was a study of eighth-grade mathematics and science teaching in seven countries. It involved videotaping and analyzing teaching practices in more than 1000 classrooms. They found that high-achieving nations engage students in searching for patterns & relationships, in wrestling with key science & math concepts. Unfortunately, in the U.S. (which scored low on TIMSS), content plays sometimes no role at all; instead, science lessons engage students in a variety of activities; and math focuses on low-level skills: procedures rather than conceptual understanding, in unnecessarily fragmented lessons. See http://timssvideo.com/timss-video-study. In particular,
Hestenes, D. (2000). Findings of the Modeling Workshop Project (1994-2000) (from Final Report submitted to the National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA). Note: the effect size was later calculated as 0.91; high! http://modeling.asu.edu/R&E/Research.html
Wells, M., Hestenes, D., and Swackhamer, G. (1995). A Modeling Method for High School Physics Instruction, Am. J. Phys. 63, 606-619
Expert Panel Review (2001): Modeling Instruction in High School Physics. (Office of Educational Research and Improvement. U.S. Department of Education, Washington, DC)
Perhaps the author should check out this resource:
Frank –
You know that I admire your work and I visit your blog quite often for advice and ideas. As someone "new" new to the modeling resources and the formalized archive of materials I agree with the vast bulk of your post. I do, however, feel that, as I attempt to use discourse methods in my own classroom, I have a strong set of "modeling" tools and ideas … but really need "the moves" that are refered to in several of the paragraphs.
I think a lot of the "moves" refer to classroom management skill that would help me to better facilitate my modeling classroom. Things like – paragraph(7) …
…" Should I give a warning or a detention? Do I require this student to attend my afterschool help session, or make it optional? Should I spend 10 minutes grading each five-paragraph essay, 20 minutes, or just not pay attention to time and work on each until it "feels" done? …
From a subsequent paragraph that seems to be exactly what modelers try for (higher order thinking) …
…" … students benefit from being asked "higher-order questions." She begins doing that. Some students, surprised at this new rigor, are frustrated. Some students throw up their hands and give up. Misbehavior ensues. … "
I find that since I've not fully developed many of "the moves" that I experience a large amount of difficulty setting and maintining the environment that is needed for discourse (among 14 year-olds) to flourish.
So … I think that you are absolutely correct in stating that the METHOD is what is important … but I feel that "the moves" are an integral part of the entire package.
Tim McKnight
(new to modeling instruction but not new to teaching. Although now that I've found it I realize it is what I've been trying to do on my own for a long time)
"The Lack of Demand for Research is No Surprised"
An excellent, thought-provoking and very insightful article. It is hard to refute the value of research (your Tom Kane example for example) though I've found myself frustrated when educators use it as an excuse to delay making change i.e. "we've got to wait for the research on this to come in". And while I subscribe to the maxim "measure twice and cut once" I also believe there's got to be a balance i.e. you have to act on faith for any chance to "win" this most important "race". Dreams, effective interventions and viable innovations deferred can ruin or possibly extinguish young lives.
Despite the obvious benefit to having and using more reliable research, I would argue you may have missed a "pink elephant" sized explanation for its relative dearth i.e. it doesn't matter, "practically" speaking, whether I (as a teacher) actual win this race. If winning really mattered good research that identified most effective practice would be worth its weight in gold and in the very highest demand. To reiterate, from a strictly practical perspective, it doesn't matter when it comes to things like whether I get recognized, rewarded, reprimanded, promoted or awarded my 3% cost of living raise and 3% step increase.
To ignore something so fundamental and universally applied to help shape the culture and behavior of almost all other industries this size ($600B) is to suggest that all its participants are sufficiently motivated by a reliable moral compass and not by what's practical or some combination of the two. It would no doubt be a far better world if that were indeed the case. Which is not to disparage our teachers in any way, rather I'd say it's more accurately about a whole lot of "good people in a bad system". One designed to give us exactly what we're getting given the way the world has changed.
So while research can and should make a significant difference I've come to the slightly demoralizing conclusion that it pales in comparison to the need for a committed, collective "will" to educate all our children to their potential, especially those in greatest need. I believe this will (combined with some excellent research) is what's required to change the system in order to get the kind of results we really need.
As a teacher I constantly strive to first) improve students behavior, second) to engage them, and third) to hold them accountable. Because classroom management is most important, I use http://www.smartclassroommanagement.com/
to understand and to respond to student behavior. I look back to my teacher education and remember complaining that what we needed was time on/in the job and then classes to determine better strategies. Most of the instruction we got could have branded "useful" but not effective. I applaud Mr. Goldstein's article and hope everyone is listening.
LOVE this article!! A comment on the legal profession (in response to the idea that law does not teach "lawyer moves"):
This is, like education, an issue that is of serious concern to the legal profession… Law professors are often just as oblivious to the practical side of the profession as education professors, and this poses problem for the practice of law, just as it poses a problem to the practice of teaching (full disclosure: I am an education professor). Here's a good NYTimes recent article on the topic:
Great article! I believe you have hit an essential issue for improving education.
Here are a few things I noticed during my nine years of experience in the teaching profession.
Teacher Credentialing programs talk about the importance of educational research but do not train teachers how to correctly evaluate or read educational research. How can a teacher discern the difference between well executed meaningful research from poorly executed and inconclusive research if they do not have the correct training on research practices? I would argue you would not need a phd only training to become a proficient research reader.
Finding good research articles can be expensive. Let's say you are a teacher who has a question about a teaching methodology. Then to do a useful search you would have to filter through abstracts to find research on your topic. Once you have your list of articles you would most likely have to purchase the articles. Most research articles are published works owned by a research journal company. So either the district would have to fund the literature search or the teacher would pay out of pocket to obtain those articles. A good literature review would require multiple articles and not all the articles would necessarily be considered good research. This expense does not even account for the time expense it would cost the teacher either.
I have found many salesman who try to sell their next educational programs misuse educational research and those educational professionals listening to the sales pitch do not have enough research expertise to make clear informed decisions about the "new educational program" they are trying to buy.
Many researchers do not do Quantitative educational research because it is more difficult and time consuming to do. Many educational researchers want to publish quantity not quality. It is easier to publish a qualitative analysis of a small group then to do a paper on an experiment that accounts for causation.
Based on my observations I would recommend that teacher credentialing programs include some sort of research reading training at the very least. If we are to include the phases as you mention in the article the perhaps teachers should become more proficient researchers.
I would also suggest that we need to find a way for teachers to have free access to research articles.
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Monday night, the Spencer County Fiscal Court voted not to approve the sale of alcohol on Sundays, but those attending that meeting have no idea why.
The issue was placed on the agenda several meetings ago by Magistrate Jerry Davis. One could assume because Davis brought up the issue, he was in favor of expanding the sale of alcoholic beverages to Sundays from 1 p.m. to midnight.
So, it's no surprise Davis made the motion to approve the ordinance.
Magistrate Hobert Judd seconded the motion for the purpose of putting the issue out there for discussion.
In the three years I spent as the commanding officer of a Coast Guard Marine Safety Unit, my decisions had significant impact on all my stakeholders. One thing I got used to really quick was that almost every decision I made was subject to a Monday morning quarterbacking.
As I travel the state, I am frequently asked what I can do about high gas prices and price fluctuations across the Commonwealth.
I understand the frustration with high gas prices. I understand how tough it is on hard-working families. No one wants to choose between filling up the gas tank or putting food on the table or paying a bill. And many of us rely on our vehicles to get to work, so that we can pay our bills. Be assured, protecting Kentucky consumers at the gas pumps is a top priority of mine.
We are in the latter part of April, when all the big events are gearing up to put on a show. As of this issue, we have enjoyed the fireworks and flyovers of "Thunder Over Louisville," and the shows will be ongoing until and including the Derby events.
Later in the spring we will see many institutes of learning celebrate the graduation of our next group of leaders.
I want to begin this article with an illustration of unity and cooperation to accomplish a goal.
Saturday night (Sept. 24) was the Progressive Dinner as promoted and served by the business community of Main Street in Taylorsville.
From start to finish, from beginning to end, all events went in perfect order. What we were served at each stop was delicious, be it appetizer to dessert. The hosts and hostesses and all involved were professional to the T.
I stated last week that the Summer Roadside Litter Abatement Program will be the last week of June, and if all goes well, it will wrap up the first week of July, weather permitting.
This means when we are on the roads, we need to watch for people helping clean up our roadsides. We have several crooked roads, and we have a lot of cars on the roads, so we all need to be on the watch for what is around the next curve.
If I'm going to do something, I want to excel at it.
The reverse is also true: if I don't pick up something easily, I'm likely to stop trying.
I never learned how to ride a bike or whistle because it didn't come easily right away. Occasionally I try whistling again, but I get frustrated and stop nearly as soon as I start.
I also would rather play caddy for my husband when he plays disc golf than play myself because I've yet to master the game. How can I master it when I never play? Good question.
We have seen more water hit the ground in the past five weeks than many people have ever seen. Water levels have risen to never before seen heights. The overflow at the lake was last seen with water pushed to the bridge.
All this means that when the waters drop and the sun stays out to dry the ground, we are going to see people catching up on their normal spring activities, from gardening to fishing and boating.
The Spencer County Emergency Management Agency has nine outdoor warning sirens located throughout Spencer County. They are designed to inform residents who are outside of a possible emergency. The sirens activate simultaneously countywide during an emergency. The outdoor warning sirens are part of an emergency system designed to provide immediate and valuable information to citizens. The system is not designed to alert those who are within a home or other structure.
What to do if the sirens
are activated
Taylorsville and Spencer County have seen their fair share of rain and floods over the past month and a half.
This week's rain made at least the third time in recent weeks that Brashears Creek has left its banks to cover the road and residents on Bowman Lane and West River Road have wondered if they'll get flooded in – or stuck out – of their neighborhoods. And that's just naming a few affected areas.
If you're anything like me, you're probably sick of rain, sick of floods and on the verge of being sick of water in general.
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The Spencer Magnet is your source for local news, sports, events, and information in Spencer County, KY and the surrounding area.

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Recently Sean wrote me from the UK and said: "I'm worried that there is no light at the end of the tunnel for me. I'm working hard, paying bills but can't reduce my debt at all. Just last month I used money from my overdraft facility to get us through the month." Debt experts all across the UK are scratching ... Read More »
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Get ejected? Expect an education
Ejection policy
• Athletes ejected from high school competition must take a few steps before they're allowed back in the game. It's an effort to turn the situation into a teaching moment.
• Minor ejections result in a meeting between the athlete and school officials. Major ejections require the athlete to meet with section officials.
• Athletes with minor ejections are suspended for one game. Major ejections draw a multigame suspension — three games in football and six games for other sports.
• Any athlete ejected a second time is finished for the season.
Ejections so for in 2012-13:
Football 35 (4 minor; 31 major)
Boys water polo 29 (25 minor; 4 major)
Basketball 13 (10 minor; 3 major)
Soccer 31 (24 minor; 7 major)
Girls water polo 3 (3 minor; 0 major)
For lack of a better term, the plan to deal with a runaway number of high school player and coach ejections could have been called CIF Detention.
Any athlete ejected from a game would suffer a mandatory one-game suspension as well as going to the San Diego Section office, then in Linda Vista, for a session with Commissioner Dennis Ackerman and his assistant, Bill McLaughlin.
The idea behind the plan, instituted about 10 years ago, was to reduce the number of ejections by discussing a player's behavior.
"There was a lot of stupid behavior around 10 years ago," said Rancho Bernardo Athletic Director Peggy Brose.
Said Granite Hills AD James Davis: "Ten years ago, everyone was running wild and something had to be done."
Last year, in his first detention session as the new assistant commissioner, John Labeta instructed nearly 100 players — he estimated at least 85 were soccer players — on the finer points of sportsmanship.
He felt like he'd not only wasted their time but his as well.
"I guarantee we got the attention of just a few players," Labeta said. "The message that was so needed before had gotten lost because some of the players weren't paying attention or they had their heads on the desk or they were texting on cellphones."
This school year, the California Interscholastic Federation's San Diego Section unveiled a new detention plan, one that involved the schools and a player's parents as part of the process.
The new procedure is meant to get the player's attention by replacing the classroom session with a one-on-one meeting.
Each ejection, which still carries the one-game suspension, is divided into a minor category or a major category.
If a player is ejected from a game for a minor infraction, that player and his parents must meet with a vice principal or the athletic director to discuss the incident. The player must also sign a statement that he understands the basis for the meeting and that the next ejection will mean the end of his season.
That statement is sent to the section office.
"At first, there was apprehension because schools felt like we were throwing it back on them," Labeta said. "After we explained we were getting repeaters and that the message wasn't getting through, they understood."
A major ejection for fighting, spitting at an opposing player or referee or for verbally abusing a referee calls for the player and his parents to skip the meeting at school for a meeting with Labeta or Commissioner Jerry Schniepp in the section office at the Hall of Champions in Balboa Park.
The player is given a multi-game suspension and informed that, like minor ejections, the next ejection will mean the end of the season. For football the suspension amounts to three games. All other sports are six games.
"Most of the kids we've seen say they understand why they're meeting with us," Labeta said. "I think they leave knowing that Jerry and I understand how quickly things during a game can get out of hand. We were both coaches at one time. We know.


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Comments about 3N2 Baseball Equipment Bag:
Awesome Catchers bag!


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Insurance delays prolong the disaster
(Page 3 of 3)
Clearly, better government regulation is needed. At the same time, Hurricane Sandy should demonstrate to homeowners, in no uncertain terms, that they need to build personal emergency funds if they can. With the ever-present threat of global warming, scientists say, the seas are becoming increasingly unpredictable. Do not believe for a second that simply because we were hit by the storm of the century this year, the threat has passed. It hasn't. The next storm of the century may come in 2013. We must begin to think differently. We must prepare.
KeywordsHerald editorial, Hurricane Sandy, homeowners, Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, flood insurance, insurance companies, insurers, claims, settlements, settlement, New York State Department of Financial Services, Allstate, Geico, Hartford, Liberty Mutual, Nationwide, Travelers, policies, premiums, public adjusters, adjuster, National Flood Insurance Program
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KAA Design Group is composed of two studios — Kirkpatrick Architects & Evens Architects — directed by our longstanding partners, Grant Kirkpatrick and Erik Evens.
Kirkpatrick Architects specializes in warm contemporary residential architecture, while Evens Architects creates homes informed by great design traditions.
Two points of view. One shared commitment to extraordinary design.


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4-H sale of apples, peanuts, honey, cookbooks underway
The Henrico County office of the Virginia Cooperative Extension has launched its fall sale of apples, peanuts, honey and cookbooks with proceeds to benefit the 4-H Youth Development program.
The annual sale features Virginia-grown produce and, for the first time, four different cookbooks, each with more than 140 recipes. The items and their prices are:
• Winesap and York apples, $18.50 per half bushel, which equates to about 88 cents per pound;
• Raw peanuts, with recipes, $9 per two-pound sack;
• Salted and unsalted deluxe cocktail peanuts, $12 per two-pound sack;
• Honey, $7 per one-pound jar; and
• Cookbooks, $6.50 apiece. The titles are "5 Ingredients or Less," "Kids in the Kitchen," "Busy Mom's Cookbook" and "Better Health." Each spiral-bound cookbook measures 5.5 by 4.25 inches, with a soft cover and 150 pages.
Order forms are available at http://www.co.henrico.va.us/extension; the Extension Office in the Human Services Building, 8600 Dixon Powers Drive; any Henrico library; and by calling 501-5160 from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday.
Because supplies are limited, orders received after Friday, Oct. 26 will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis. Orders will be available for pickup from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 14 and from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 15 at the loading dock of the Human Services Building. For details, call 501-5160.
19th Annual Asian American Celebration planned May 21
Citizen Staff Reports 05/16/2016
The Asian American Society of Central Virginia will hold its 19th Annual Asian American Celebration on Saturday, May 21 at the Greater Richmond Convention Center, 403 N. 3rd St. in Richmond, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Admission is free.
The theme for this year's celebration will be "Our Heritage," in recognition of May as the Asian Pacific American Heritage month, designated by the U.S. Congress in 1992. > Read more.
The theme for this year's celebration will be "Our Heritage," in recognition of May as the Asian Pacific American Heritage month, designated by the U.S. Congress in 1992. > Read more.
Sandston Founders Club honors Sydnor
The Founders Club of Sandston presented lifetime membership to Charles W. Sydnor at its 12th annual meeting last month.
Sydnor, who grew up in Sandston and later served as president of Emory and Henry College for eight years, was honored by Founder Club President Alice Taylor Baldwin at the April 23 event at Sandston Memorial Recreation Center. > Read more.
Restaurant watch
Find out how your favorite dining establishments fared during their most recent inspections by the Virginia Department of Health. > Read more.
DRPT to host public meeting in Henrico about future of transit
Business in brief
17 Henrico schools earn Virginia Index of Performance awards
Henrico-based Virginia Bankers Association announces scholarship recipients
2 Henrico students win Congressional Art Awards
- More News
Print Edition
May. 19, 2016Click here to read the print edition.
Restaurant watch
Weekend Top 10
Cultural Arts Center announces summer class schedule
CAT's 53rd season opens with new directors
Weekend Top 10
- More Entertainment
Obituary – Donald Mayo
Obituary – Anna Lee "Toady" Ward
Obituary – George Edward Moore, III
- More Obituaries
19th Annual Asian American Celebration planned May 21
Sandston Founders Club honors Sydnor
Anthem LemonAid registration opens
- More Community
'Good old days' were good – for some
Of character and parenting
Opinion: Rename school for late Henrico officer
- More Opinions
Strawberry visits Tuckahoe Little League
Athlete of the Week – July 3: Kayla Sell
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Reader Survey | Advertising | Email updates
Place an Ad | More Classifieds
CalendarThe Henrico County Community Author Showcase, a program that connects writers and readers in the community, will begin at 7 p.m. and continue on Thursdays at various libraries. Pamela Bradley… Full text


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Current AnnouncementsFROM: Dr. Clarissa Confer RE: CALU Alumni to speak at Civil War Roundtable!
Sent: 5/1/2013 8:08:38 PM
To: Students, Faculty, Staff
The monthly meeting of the Civil War Roundtable at California University of PA will be on Thursday, May 9th, 2013 from 7:00PM to 9:00PM in the KARA-BOOKER GREAT ROOM in the KARA ALUMNI HOUSE. Doors will be open at 6:30pm.
0ur speaker is Mr. Dan Clendaniel who is a 1978 graduate of California University of PA and is currently a Teacher in Residence at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico.
Dan's talk focuses on a chronological study of the men of the 85th Pennsylvania Infantry in their own words through the written records they left behind.
His talk is entitled: "The Experiences of John and Stephen Clendaniel in the Civil War."
Anyone interested in Civil War history is welcome to attend! For more information, email firstname.lastname@example.com or call Mike at 412-417-1516.


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May 25, 2016
Associate Press Release
MIAMI (AP) -- Businesses and workers-rights advocates are fighting over a bill that would set uniform state standards for employees who say they haven't been paid their full wages to seek compensation.
The bill would require workers to file a claim through the courts and limit damages to the amount they are owed. It also would require workers to notify employers 15 days before filing a claim and prove the theft by "a preponderance of evidence."
Opponents say those measures will make it difficult for low-paid workers who often can't afford an attorney or to take time off from work to go to court.
The bill also prohibits local governments from adopting their own wage theft ordinances, though an exception would be carved out for Miami-Dade County.
Click Here to access the online Public Inspection File
Viewers with disabilities can get assistance accessing this station's FCC Public Inspection File by contacting the station with the information listed below. Questions or concerns relating to the accessibility of the FCC's online public file system should be directed to the FCC at 888-225-5322, 888-835-5322 (TTY), or firstname.lastname@example.com.


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The cute Pink Flower Clock from Curly Cue is 10 inches wide by 11 inches tall. Give any space a touch of Springtime! The Pink Flower Clock comes with one AA battery and a hanging nail, so it's ready to use right out of the box! This clock is not free standing but needs to be hung.
This product is out of stock


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Looks like you left Chashio's town off the poll? (Ah, just saw his post. Nevermind.)
Tough voting on this one. I could vote for any of them!
It's time to vote on this month's Lite Challenge!
The challenge this time was to map a subject of the artist's choice, as long as it was in Isometric perspective. This month's field is small, but the entries are fantastic!
Please vote for ONE entry. The thumbnails can be found here:
The poll will close in 4 days, and the winner will receive a shiny new Silver Compass award.
Good luck everyone!
Looks like you left Chashio's town off the poll? (Ah, just saw his post. Nevermind.)
Tough voting on this one. I could vote for any of them!
Last edited by LindaJeanne; 07-16-2012 at 07:06 AM.
I must say that the works are good and come in different styles. Congrat to all!
I voted for Larb entry, very nice work! Nice mood and great colors.
Chashio's work was really getting good, and I think that if completed, I would have voted for his.
LindaJeanne's work is surprising and nice... could be used as a 3D labyrinth for players (provide headache pills pls...) or with last rivers and reliefs, a kind of staircase world... maybe you just need to add some cosmological animal to carry it on its back. Very creative work!
As you say, Gidde... small field, fantastic entries! Tons of fun watching them evolve.
Oh.. Its so hard to choose, but I think I have to vote for Ghostmans Arena there, even thou it is a very close call, especially with Larbs beutifull Cave system.
same here, had to vote for the arena - the vectors look too tasty not too (though sadly i cant give any rep yet :s, need to sort that out)
My W.I.P Elyden globe map thread - please check it out and let me know what you think
my gallery
my worldbuilding and cartographical blog please sub!
my Patreon!
Can I vote for two maps? It's a difficult choice. I like all the entries a lot, and it a **** shame Chashio had this hardware trouble and couldn't finish his work. The hippodrome is really pretty and crisp and I'm a big fan of Roman architecture. LindaJeanne's map is quite original and reminds me of the endless staircase stories of the Planescape campaign setting. My two favourites are the Hill Fort and Larb's cave. My vote goes to the latter.
Kudos to everyone, though. Awesome work!
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"- Isaac Asimov
My place on DeviantArt
Some wonderful maps and, I'll be the first to admit, a hard challenge for the Lite competition!
Really difficult. I almost had to flip a coin - sort of. Or roll a dice. Do you even get three sided dice? Anyway, I love Roman history and architecture, I also love iron age history and architecture. I also like when people try to do something out of the box so to speak. Also Linda's piece still reminds me of a movie a I and a friend think so fondly of.
I hate voting for things. =P


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|Extension Corner
|Written by Tracy Trumper
The common cold: To supplement or not to supplement, you be the judge
It seems like the last few months I have been hit with some sort of ailment that puts me "under the weather" for at least a week. Being that I have a small child at home, I just attributed it to the fact that I am in that period of time where everyone gets whatever "bugs" are brought home from children.
My mom suggested taking Airborne when I feel something coming on. She really attested to how it seems to help her when she travels overseas. So, I thought maybe I should try it. But, does it really work?
The Wellness Letter from the School of Public Heath at the University of California at Berkley provides "their take" on several supplements for the common cold. These single nutrients or herbs that are marketed with cold-fighting ability may not stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Airborne is a common supplement that at one time had to pay a $30 million settlement to the Federal Trade Commission for making unproven claims about curing and preventing colds and flu. This supplement is packed with vitamins (A, C and E), minerals (magnesium, zinc and selenium) and Echinacea, ginger and bouquet of other herbs. So far, there have been inconsistent results with various controlled studies with some of the ingredients in Airborne.
Conclusion: Airborne is a waste of money and actually may weaken bones if the supplement is taken often over time because of the high vitamin A level.
Echinacea is an herbal remedy that claims to stimulate the immune system and have antiviral and anti-inflammatory effects. Again, studies are inconsistent in showing any real cold-fighting effects. A 2010 and 2011 study found that the Echinacea was no better than a placebo at preventing colds or reducing the symptoms.
Conclusion: Claims about cold-fighting effects of Echinacea are unsupported by solid research.
With very little human research to back the common belief that garlic can prevent the common cold, one should think twice about trying this method. About all it is going to give you is bad breath.
Cold-fX, a patented North American extract of ginseng, that you can only get online in the U.S. may help against colds and flu when taken daily for several months. However, that is going to cost you about $30 a month. With that, and the possibility that long term use may interact negatively with certain drugs, like the blood thinner, warfarin, and cause potential problems in those that have health conditions, like autoimmune disorders, is it really worth it?
Probiotics are supplements that provide good bacteria to the intestines that can strengthen immunity and support digestive health. Again, studies are limited, and therefore, this supplement is not recommended for cold prevention.
The big vitamin C, is a popular nutrient supplement that has numerous claims of cold-fighting ability. However, with mixed results from studies looking at the vitamin's role in reducing the severity and/or duration of cold symptoms, the verdict seems to be changing. A good point was made about vitamin C, "If there were a significant benefit, it wouldn't be so hard to prove."
There is the same consensus for vitamin D, which is thought to protect against respiratory infections because of its role in the immune system. Vitamin D has been found to be a good supplement for bone health but not in preventing or decreasing the effects of the common cold. A few studies looked at giving vitamin D for 12 weeks to see if the participant's risk of upper respiratory infections decreased. Again, the studies had disappointing results.
This could have been due to the fact that these individuals had normal levels of vitamin D; maybe it would have been different for individuals that were deficient in vitamin D.
Last, but not least, what about zinc? This is a supplement that should be used with caution. Prolonged use of high doses of zinc can interfere with the absorption of copper and then impair the immune system. Zinc directly applied to the nose can actually damage the sense of smell, so avoid any zinc product applied directly to the nose. In addition, zinc products can cause possible side effects, like nausea, diarrhea, cramps and bad taste in the mouth.
The research shows that zinc lozenges taken within 24 hours of cold symptoms may reduce the severity and duration of a cold by a day. No research shows that zinc products will prevent the cold, however. Consequently, with some health risks, is the minimal benefit worth it?
Basically, it probably is not going to hurt if you take a supplement as you feel a cold coming on, but not throughout a cold season as is often recommended, because there can be adverse effects. Probably the best thing you can do to prevent illness that has been supported by research is wash your hands frequently and get your immunizations, like the flu shot. Of course, talk with your doctor to see what they recommend.
Holyoke Enterprise December 6, 2012


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I finally got everything going on my zimbra so I let one of our newer customers over onthe zimbra to try it out.
But I can't see his email (and can't either). He has 10 Meg quota and he is showing 5.2M used. I reindexed the mail box and showed about 35 messages being reindexed. But they don't show up for downloading or via the web interface.


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Radome with Double-layered Dielectric Lens
Application ID: 12027
A radome minimizes losses and improves radiation characteristics of an antenna through its design. The structure can be optimized to minimize the transmission loss and also designed to improve radiation characteristics including antenna directivity and side lobes.
Shown in the model is the surface current density on the patch antenna, the magnitude of the electric potential on the antenna's substrate, and the electric field in the radome's shell.


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|Tri Chi and Kappa will go on a scavenger hunt across campus and eat Thanksgiving desserts in the Tiger Den.
|This will be a basketball tournament containing as many teams of 3 that sign up. They will ball hard until one team will rise as champions.This event will be both friday evening and the championship game will be on Saturday morning.
Chi Rho Phi prayer meeting.
Chi Rho Phi prayer meeting.
The men of Kappa Chi are bringing back the Kappa Late Night tradition this year! With the combination of witty monologues, hilarious videos and improv sketches, the campus of Ouachita will be in for one night of good times and laughs.


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Buffalo, NY (Sports Network) - Thomas Vanek had two goals and three assists to
help the Buffalo Sabres open their season with a 5-2 win over the Philadelphia
Flyers on Sunday.
Jason Pominville had three assists while Steve Ott, Cody Hodgson and Tyler
Myers all scored for the Sabres, who missed the playoffs for the third time in
the past five seasons after an 89-point performance in 2011-12. Ryan Miller
stopped 27-of-29 shots.
Sean Couturier and Claude Giroux each lit the lamp for the Flyers, who opened
the season on Saturday with a home loss to the Penguins. Ilya Bryzgalov gave
up four goals on 40 shots in the loss.
The Sports Network


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Martin Margiela Cheers Ring
It's the perfect gift. Check it out 'cheers' enscribed on one side, and there is a bottle opener feature on the opposite. DUDE!
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Whisky Stones made of Vermont Soapstone. The Whisky stones will chill but not dilute your most cherished Whisky or Scotch. Whisky Stones are non-porous and will not change the flavor of your Whisky.Tags: home, gifts, wine, food, kitchen, accessories, style, glass, entertainingAdded 7 Years Ago from Fitzsu
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Perfect for your alcoholic boyfriend.


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Giles to highlight traditional skills at event
Published: Thursday, February 14, 2013 at 1:31 p.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, February 14, 2013 at 1:31 p.m.
In the town of Lubec, Maine, in the 1950s and '60s, life was hard, and Bob Giles doesn't want anyone to forget.
If you go
What: Grand Oaks Classic Pleasure Driving Competition
When: 9 a.m. Friday, Feb. 15 and Saturday, Feb. 16; 10:30 a.m. Sunday, Feb. 17
Extra: Bob Giles Down East presentation, noon Saturday
Where: 3000 Marion County Road, Weirsdale
Cost: $10
Contact: 750-1763 or www.thegrandoaks.com
On Saturday, during the 2013 Grand Oaks Classic at Grand Oaks Resort in Weirsdale, Giles will make a presentation about life in the area of Maine known as Down East. The presentation includes a replica of a logging cart that Giles built himself.
The little town of Lubec, which had a population of just about 1,300 in 2010, consisted mostly of people who worked long hours at physical labor such as fishing, farming or logging in the '50s and '60s. Giles grew up in the town — which boasts being the easternmost point of the United States — driving draft horses as a young teen.
"No one had tractors or machinery. They were too expensive But everyone had draft horses," said Giles, who eventually became an accomplished carriage driver and trains driving horses and holds clinics around the country and the world.
As a child, Giles, who now lives in Morriston, bounced from foster home to foster home; 13 in all. His first inquiry at each home was usually about the type of draft horse they had.
"I drove my first horse in 1955. I loved the opportunity to be able to drive them," Giles said.
Eventually, he went into logging. Because of the craggy, mucky terrain of Down East the most efficient way to get logs out of the woods was to haul them with teams of draft horses.
Giles combined his love of driving horses with a way to make a living.
"There was no easy way to make a living, but it was the lure of the land that made good men stay in this little fishing community," he said.
Giles built the "new" logging cart for his weekend presentation much the same way they did decades ago.
"I went to the dump and found most of the parts and put them together. The front axle is from a '65 Chevy. The rear axle is from a '55 Ford, and the frame is an old boat trailer," he said. "After a few days working in that Down East terrain, something was going to break. There was no sense going out and buying something new."
Giles worked his way into driving an eight-horse draft team and later got into carriage driving. He established Winter Hill Driving Center in Morriston in 1981.
Despite his success, Giles said he has never forgotten where he came from and wants to share that experience with other generations so they can be grateful for what they have.
"I think it's a piece of history that needs to be preserved. If someone doesn't document these facts, they will just go by the wayside. The generation of my grandkids won't know how easy they really have it. Down East, you really had to do whatever it was to survive. You raked blueberries, dug potatoes, hauled pulpwood, whatever it took," he said.
The Grand Oaks Classic Pleasure Driving Competition begins at 9 a.m. today and Saturday, and 10:30 a.m. Sunday. The event includes reinsmanship, obstacles courses, pleasure driving and more.
Reader comments posted to this article may be published in our print edition. All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged.


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Oak Glen 6
Wheeling Central 1
WARWOOD - Anna Crawford, Abbi Sayre and Madison Juszcak all scored singles victories as Oak Glen knocked off Wheeling Central.
Joanna Capito picked up the lone Maroon Knights victory, at No. 1 singles.
Wheeling Central 7
Oak Glen 0
WARWOOD - Jonathan Haley, Brett Szeligo, Gus Schmidt and Daniel Lee all won in singles and doubles as Wheeling Central swept Oak Glen.
Ben Gordon and Billy Teufel teamed for a No. 3 doubles victory for the Maroon Knights.


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After a successful kidney transplant, your new kidney will filter your blood, so you will no longer need dialysis.
To prevent your body from rejecting your donor kidney, you'll require medications to suppress your immune system. You'll likely take these drugs for the rest of your life. Because medications to suppress your immune system make your body more vulnerable to infection, your doctor may also prescribe antibacterial, antiviral and antifungal medications.
After transplant, skin checkups with a dermatologist to screen for skin cancer and keeping your other cancer screening up to date is strongly advised.
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Results for each transplant center can be found at the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients.
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We comply with the HONcode standard for trustworthy health information: verify here.


text:
May 31, 2016
Some education proponents say that 20 years after landmark school reforms in Mississippi the state is again falling behind.
Former Gov. William Winter, the architect of the 1982 Education Reform Act, says the sweeping reforms achieved the promise expected, but now must evolve.
After the 1982 legislation, kindergarten became mandatory, education compulsory, standards uniform and more stringent and credentials for teaching tougher to obtain.
Retired Jackson schools Superintendent Jayne Sargent says the
state must keep moving forward with new reforms.
Today's concerns are:
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Viewers with disabilities can get assistance accessing this station's FCC Public Inspection File by contacting the station with the information listed below. Questions or concerns relating to the accessibility of the FCC's online public file system should be directed to the FCC at 888-225-5322, 888-835-5322 (TTY), or email@example.com.


text:
Media Relations
Everyone Has a Story. We Want to Tell Yours.
We are responsible for the University of San Francisco's interaction with the print, broadcast, and online media, as well as the dissemination of university news and information. We provide strategic communications consultation and extensive media relations services to the USF community and external news media.
We draft news releases, media advisories, calendar listings, and other materials to publicize news of faculty research, academic programs, and newsworthy university happenings. We develop story angles, work with reporters, connect media with faculty, and distribute information to local, national, and international news organizations.
We also provide public relations counsel and communication support to the entire university community on a variety of communication issues.
Do you need help drafting a press release? Are you an accomplished academic in your field who is willing to speak to the media? Are you a reporter trying to locate an academic expert?
Email or call Anne-Marie Devine, senior director of media relations, at (415) 422-2697 (mobile: (415) 279-9137).


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I've had Zimbra configured to allow what I thought would be approximately 10 MB attachments to be sent/received. Taking into account some message overhead, I had the "Maximum message size" set to 12582912 kb. I thought everything was working OK, but today I had a user receive a message, with an attachment, which shows in the "Size" column as 10 MB. When she tried to forward the message, adding just a small comment, the message was rejected due to the size. My initial thought was that it had just squeaked through, and now the forward with even a small amount of text had pushed it over the limit. When I did some checking I saw that the attachment is only around 7.5 MB. My next thought was that maybe I had underestimated the message overhead. I did some searching around here on the forums and on the web, and found that the message overhead may be around 30%. So, I bumped up my setting a little, and sure enough the message went through. However, when I looked at the logs on our Internet email gateway server, which is running Postfix, the message size shows up as only 10409006 kb. So, what is Zimbra calculating that made it think my message was over my original max message size limit? Or am I just not understanding something about this setting?
Also, on a related matter, when I went to the Admin panel to change this setting I only saw one "size" setting field. I seem to remember that the used to also be a setting for the maximum size of an uploaded file (not sure of the exact wording). I know I can change this setting from the command line, with 'zmprov', but just curious as to why it's not on the Admin page anymore. Did something change in version 5?


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Winston-Salem, NC (Sports Network) - Travis McKie scored 19 points for Wake
Forest as the Demon Deacons defeated the Xavier Musketeers, 66-59, in the Skip
Prosser Classic at Joel Coliseum.
Although McKie was just 5-of-15 from the field, he shot 7-of-9 from the free
throw line while also tallying eight rebounds, two blocks, and two steals.
Codi Miller-McIntyre recorded 16 points and C.J. Harris added 15 for Wake
Forest (7-5), which has now won three in a row and four of its last
five. Devin Thomas dominated the boards, pulling down 14 rebounds.
Travis Taylor recorded a double-double with 18 points and 10 rebounds as
Xavier (7-6) suffered its fourth consecutive loss. Despite shooting only 3-
of-11 from the field, Semaj Christon added 14 points. Jeff Robinson scored 10
points off the bench.
The Demon Deacons led 31-26 at the break after making good on 5-of-11 3-point
attempts. Xavier was without a 3-pointer in the first half.
In the second half, the Musketeers connected on just 36.4 percent of their
shots from the field as Wake Forest held on for the seven-point win
Xavier was plagued by a game-high 20 turnovers, which Wake Forest turned into
29 points.
The Sports Network


text:
When I try to conect to Zimbra Server via Soap allways say not authorized.
I get the AuthToken like this:
String tok = sp.getAuthToken();
sp is the class SoapProvisioning in package com.zimbra.cs.account.soap.SoapProvisioning
and I build the URL https://server/service/preauth?isredirect=1&authtoken={} and between the branches token value.
And allways opens Zimbras login screen.
Before doing all this I autenticate as admin and reponse was correct.
Anyone tried a Signal Sign On with Zimbra?
Thank you


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By KIM NORTH
For the News-Register
CONNORVILLE - The third time was a charm Saturday night for Buckeye Local's Nate Kirk and Martins Ferry's Damon Outward.
For differing reasons, however.
Kirk made his third trip to the championship finals of the Pepsi/Ohio Coatings Panther Classic Wrestling Tournament a winning one after settling for runner-up two previous times.
The Panthers senior posted a 5-0 decision against Oak Glen's Avery Flowers to claim the 132-pound crown. For his accomplishments, he was also voted the Most Outstanding Wrestler.
Fact Box
Pepsi/Ohio Coatings Panther Classic
(at Buckeye Local)
1. Brooke 249; 2. Plum, Pa. 234; 3. Chartiers Valley, Pa. 199; 4. Buckeye Local 195; 5. Oak Glen 192; 6. (tie) Fox Chapel, Pa., West Allegheny, Pa. 190; 8. St. Clairsville 168; 9. (tie) Avella, Pa., West Mifflin, Pa. 165; 11. Martins Ferry 154; 12. Steubenville Central 127; 13. Edison 88; 14. Indian Creek 82; 15. Bellaire 50; 16. Charleroi, Pa. 47; 17. Linsly 40; 18. Bridgeport 29; 19. Pittsburgh Westinghouse, Pa. 22; 20. California, Pa. 4; 21. (tie) United Local, Weir 0
106-Jared Rice (FC) md. Sullivan (CV), 13-0
113-James Harrison (WM) d. Ryan Cunningham (WA), 7-1
120-Matthew Beaman (Brk) md. Josh Cornell (OG), 12-3
126-Damon Outward (MF) d. Kyle Mack (OG), 7-3
132-Nate Kirk (BL) d. Avery Flowers (OG), 5-0
138-Nick Gavazzi (Char) d. Eric Green (P), 10-4
145-Nate Hall (WA) d. Jesse Griffin (CV), 5-2
152-Dillon Shaw (Brk) md. Nick Maffe (Bell), 14-3
160-Josh Bahr (WA) d. Dalton Nolte (STC), 4-1
170-Noah Wilps (CV) md. Andrew McRandal (P), 12-2
182-Skippy Scurry (Brk) d. Mitchell Wells (E)
195-Jake DiGullo (P) d. Nathan Dawson (Brk), 3-1
220-Jake Temple (A) d. Zac Coole (MF), 3-1
285-Tyler Lever (FC) d. Corey Ernest (STC), 6-5
106-Ryan Debee (OG) d. Anthony DiNinnio (P)
113-Sam Ronevich (BL) d. Theo Zoupoulidis (MF)
120-Thomas Zunno (P) d. Blake Kiedrowski (SC)
126-Kyle Moffitt (IC) d. Carter Shar (WM)
132-Maury Gamble (Brk) d. Nick Fisher (E)
138-Clayton Sekel (CV) d. Nick Kusich (A)
145-Cory Mahon (FC) d. James Wise (MF)
152-Tyler Heasley (FC) d. Josh Sokolowski (BL)
160-Leo Hermann (SC) d. Brodie Bittinger (OG)
170-Seth Benge (STC) d. Brad Tomolonis (Bpt)
182-Nate Turchick (P) d. JP Solomon (BL)
195-Mike Roper (CV) d. Derek Allen (A)
220-Michael Furbee (STC) d. Kasey Teyssier (WA)
285-Preston Wise (Brk) d. Shawn Devey (WM)
Most Outstanding Wrestler: Nate Kirk (BL)
"I'm really happy to be able to win it my senior year," Kirk said. "To be named the outstanding wrestler is something that I always wanted to get. To do it my senior year is pretty special."
Kirk, the top seed who finished second his freshman and sophomore seasons, dominated from the outset and never let up in hiking his record to an impressive 39-7.
Outward became a 3-time titlist when he defeated Oak Glen's Kyle Mack, the top seed, by a 7-3 count. The Purple Riders senior standout was ahead 2-0 after one period and 6-3 entering the final frame.
It wasn't the first victory for Outward against his Golden Bears opponent as he also sent him to the consolation brackets after their Ron Mauck OVAC semifinal bout.
"After I saw the seeds I was kind of upset with it, but I also used that as my motivation the entire match to prove that I am better than he is."
Outward captured titles as a freshman and sophomore, while finishing as a runnerup last year. He is now 33-4.
Four other local matmen came away with silver trophies. They included Bellaire's Nick Maffe (152), St. Clairsville's Dalton Nolte (160), Martins Ferry's Zac Coole (220) and the Red Devils Corey Ernest (285). Maffe, the third seed who ousted No. 2 Josh Sokolowski of Buckeye Local in the semifinals, lost a 14-3 nod to top-seeded Dillon Shaw of Brooke.
Nolte, the No. 2 seed, was knocked off by fourth-seeded Josh Bahr of West Allegheny.
Cooke, the No. 3 seed, dropped a 3-1 decision to Avella's Jake Temple, the top seed who improved to 29-1.
Ernest, the No. 2 seed, lost a 6-5 heartbreaker to fourth-seeded Tyler Lever, of Fox Chapel, in a matchup that never had much time to prepare.
Due to the inclement weather conditions, the heavyweight bout was wrestled first to allow the Pennsylvania team to head home early.
Eight other local wrestlers placed in the top four of their respective weight class.
Buckeye Local, which finished fourth in the team standings with 195 points, had Sam Ronevich finish third at 113, while Sokolowski and JP Solomon each placed fourth at 152 and 182, respectively.
Martins Ferry ended up in 11th place team-wise with 154 points. The Purple Riders had Theo Zoumpoulidis (113) take fourth, as did James Wise (145).
St. Clairsville, which was eighth overall, had a pair of third-place finishers in Seth Benge (170) and Michael Furbee (220).
Bridgeport's Brad Tomolonis (170) finished fourth.
Brooke, with a trio of championships, took top team honors with 249 points, which was 15 ahead of Plum, Pa. Chartiers Valley, Pa., was third, and Oak Glen fifth.
Other championships included Fox Chapel's Jared Rice (106), West Mifflin's James Harrison (113), Brooke's Matthew Beaman (120), Charleroi's Nick Gavazzi (138), West Allegheny's Nate Hall (145), Chartiers Valley's Noah Wilps (170), Brooke's Skippy Scurry (185) and Plum's Jake DiGullo (195).