A Recipe for Learning
Cookies or math? Hmmm. Which do kids like best?
The answer was obvious enough for one elementary school teacher to use it to her advantage.
Gayle Moore, who recently retired as a teacher at LaGrange Elementary School in Oldham County, cared enough about her students to visit their homes, talk to their parents and try to find ways to blend children's home-life experiences into her lessons to make them more interesting.
She gathered parents' and kids' favorite recipes for cookies and other dishes and used them to create math problems not found in textbooks.
"I told them they could use anything in the room to solve the problem and express their answers any way they wanted, whether it was through drawings, tables or something similar," Moore says.
In one problem, Moore's students had to figure out how many of 90 cookies of various types familiar to them would be left at a party if 20 adults had one cookie each and 25 children had two each.
The students solved the problem by drawing the total number of cookies, marking out the 20 eaten by adults with a line and crossing out the 50 eaten by the children. They counted the remainder and wrote that number at the bottom of the poster board.
Lessons based on home experiences can help at-risk
students improve their learning skills, according to
(from left) elementary school teachers Karen Miller
and Gayle Moore along with U of L education reseachers
Ellen McIntyre and Diane Kyle. Their research findings
are in the book Reaching Out."Even if they didn't know the mathematics functions to use, they could still solve the problem by thinking it out," Moore says.
With lessons like this linking family life to school, some of her lower-achieving students from low-income families greatly improved their math scores and closed the gap with their middle-class peers.
Moore's teaching strategies are among many studied by two U of L educators who are interested in the most effective methods of teaching children at risk for failing in school.
Ellen McIntyre, professor of teaching and learning in the College of Education and Human Development, and Diane Kyle, co-director of the college's Nystrand Center of Excellence, used a $500,000 grant to study teaching methods that improve the literacy and mathematics abilities of at-risk students. The grant came from the Center for Research for Education, Diversity and Excellence (CREDE), an organization sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education.
For four years McIntyre and Kyle followed 10 teachers and 56 children at five elementary schools in Jefferson, Oldham, Bullitt, Shelby and Spencer counties. They focused on two groups of children, those from inner-city neighborhoods and those whose families had recently moved from Kentucky's Appalachian region.
They visited homes as many as 14 times each during the four-year study period to learn how to blend family knowledge with school curricula.
"We had to see beyond the school environment to get a better sense of how to support and develop children's literacy and math skills," McIntyre says.
Their research is summarized in the book, Reaching Out: A K-8 Resource for Connecting Families and Schools (Corwin Press, 2002) by McIntyre, Kyle, Moore and Karen Miller, a teacher at Roby Elementary School in Bullitt County, Ky.
"Contrary to popular perception, these parents hold the same goals for their children that middle class families have," McIntyre says. "They want their children to be able to support themselves and to have stable, happy lives."
"Some families often need help in knowing how to support their children at home. And teachers often don't know families well enough to learn from them."
Teachers and the researchers made the home visits together.
From those visits came ideas for classroom lessons that the children and families were comfortable with.
"I would include something in the lesson about one of the children's pets or name something in their yard or house," Moore says. "That really grabbed their attention."
"We found that teachers who are able to incorporate family experience into their curricula achieve the best results at closing the gap," McIntyre says.
When the students' literacy achievement was assessed at the end of the study, McIntyre and Kyle discovered that out of the 56 students, four were "leapers" who made more progress than expected in narrowing the gap with middle class students, eight maintained above-average achievement and 27 progressed as expected. However, 17 had regressed in their reading and writing skills.
Students performed much better in mathematics. Most progressed and only eight fell behind.
"While we are pleased with some of the results, we didn't think that we would have any students on the low end of the spectrum," McIntyre says. "I have always believed that good teaching makes a difference, especially if the children have good teachers for multiple years—which they did in this study—but I guess in reality other factors are more powerful." The researchers say more studies need to be done to understand those factors.
The study did not find any significant difference in the children's achievement when race and geographical location were considered.
Both McIntyre and Kyle add that no one curriculum or instructional approach is guaranteed to help at-risk children learn.
"Helping children succeed always is a multifaceted challenge," Kyle says. "Students need to feel known by their teacher and feel they are meaningful. This is best achieved by high engagement, whether in or out of the classroom."
Moore agrees.
"Teachers need to ask parents for help in reaching their children," Moore adds. "Many parents feel alienated by schools and don't see them as a welcoming place. If parents do not feel that they are a valued part of the education process, their children's learning suffers."
