Around the World (in Three Projects)

by Lory Hough

Just as Bill Gates once said that "Globalization is forcing companies to do things in new ways," it's also forcing universities to do things in new ways, especially when it comes to research. The Ed School is no exception. Today, more and more research is being done that looks beyond the borders of the United States, despite the fact that there are plenty of hot-bed domestic issues like mandatory testing, inequities in school funding, and the achievement gap to keep every faculty member, research assistant, and Ph.D. student busy. In this feature, we give a brief snapshot of three such research projects.

Passing Grade?
Mexico's education system gets final Ed School evaluación

As the two vans pull up to the heavily guarded gates of Los Pinos, Mexico's version of the White House, which is at the end of a long drive lined with palm trees and manicured gardens, a crowd of about 30 is already gathered. They are a mixed group -- politicians, academics, and staff from Mexico's Secretariat of Public Education -- and there's a sense of anticipation in the air. Not only are they waiting to be let into the building, but they are waiting for President Vicente Fox to arrive, and, more importantly, they are waiting for the day's big event: It's November and the Harvard team, in the vans, is back to present their findings from a nine-month study of four of Mexico's national education programs.

map of the world In one of the vans, Ed School lecturer Ilona Holland, Ed.M.'85, Ed.D.'91, is in the back seat, still hovering over her speech. Although she has been working on it and practicing her Spanish greetings for days with Mexican native Eugenia Garduño, Ed.M.'06, she is nervous.

"Make it better, make it better," she says, laughing as she continues to tweak the text.

Holland, along with the rest of the team -- Dean Kathleen McCartney, Professor Richard Murnane, Professor Hiro Yoshikawa, Professor Fernando Reimers, Ed.M.'84, Ed.D.'88, (principal investigator of the project), Garduño, and doctoral student Sergio Cárdenas, Ed.M.'04 -- knows it's important to get it right because, as President Fox would later say at the presentation ceremony, "Education is one of the most important and heartfelt issues facing Mexico."

Which is why, last spring, the Mexican Secretariat of Public Education contacted Reimers to design an evaluation of four education projects that had been started under the Fox administration: preschool education reform (McCartney, Yoshikawa); national literacy (Reimers, Professor Catherine Snow); PEC, a program that decentralizes decision-making in schools (Murnane, Cardenas, Professor John Willett); and a technology program called Enciclomedia (Holland, Garduno, Professor Chris Dede, Senior Lecturer Jim Honan, Ed.M.'85, Ed.D.'89, Professor David Perkins).

In March, the group made their first visit to the country, one of the most densely populated in the world, to visit schools, conduct initial interviews, and collect data. What they found and presented in November was a mixed bag: some of the programs and mandates were working, but others needed major changes, more money, and a greater commitment from everyone involved.

Back at Los Pinos, Fox stands at the podium and, despite the fact that everything he's heard isn't completely positive, he praises the process.

"In the past, the practice was that the results of education evaluations were best kept secret," he says. "Today, with democracy and transparency, the results are with everybody, good and bad."

Education secretary Reyes Tamez, holding a copy of the paperback produced from the evaluation, Aprender Más Y Mejor, agrees.

"It's not about right or wrong," he says, "but setting goals and reaching them."

For the most part, the Ed School's fi ndings are positive. When it comes to the law that made preschool a requirement for three-, four-, and five-year-olds, for instance, McCartney and Yoshikawa found that attendance by four- and five-year-olds was nearly perfect: 98 percent for five-year-olds, 81 percent for four-year-olds. They were especially impressed that the country created the mandate in the first place.

"Mexico clearly understands the importance of getting children off on the right foot," McCartney says to the crowd of about 500.

On the flipside, they also found that attendance by three-year-olds is disappointingly low -- only 25 percent -- and suggest that the policy be reconsidered so that families who want to send their three-year-olds would be supported, but not required.

Murnane and his team also found mixed results when they evaluated Mexico's five-year-old Programa Escuela de Calidad, known as PEC. Schools that agreed to become "PEC schools" were given greater freedom to develop their own plans for improvement -- a sharp contrast to earlier days when all schools were run in the same way under federal guidelines. The team found that after three years of participation, PEC schools had lower dropout rates, but not in the country's poorest states.

"These are the states in the greatest need of improvement in their educational systems," Murnane says at the presentation, in Spanish.

Another new initiative studied involved Enciclomedia, a software package being tested in schools that digitalizes traditional textbooks and adds innovative technology, such as videos and maps, and can be tailored to the country's many indigenous cultures.

Overall, Holland found that the software had significantly improved learning.

"It's like bringing libraries of information right into the classrooms," she says (not sounding nervous). A few weeks later, back in Cambridge, she says that's part of what got her interested in the project in the first place.

"Fernando asked me to become one of the leads on this project. When he explained that I would be evaluating a national computer-based curriculum that had been placed in thousands of classrooms in Mexico, I was very intrigued," she says. "I was interested because I thought this was an opportunity to help millions of children. If the program was strong, empirical data was needed to support its scaling and sustainability. If it was weak, the opportunity would be there to identify ways to improve the program in order to enable it to better meet its goals. Either way, my work would make a difference."

What her team found was that although the Mexican press, in articles written after the Los Pinos presentation, focused on the lack of electricity in many cash-poor areas of the country as a major problem, the real obstacle for Enciclomedia is poorly trained teachers who are not always held accountable for their performance. In addition, the program is offered only to fourth and fifth graders and needs to be expanded to other grades.

At Los Pinos, Reimers, who also gives his presentation in Spanish, talks about literacy issues, which Mexico is trying to address with a National Classroom Literacy Program that supplements literacy instruction by providing classroom libraries and professional teacher development in all nine grades of
compulsory education. He says that the program has increased the availability of varied reading materials, but the main challenge is developing eff ective approaches of professional development that can support teachers as they integrate using the classroom libraries with literacy instruction.

"Access to a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction texts is indispensable to produce the kind of sophisticated readers that an evolving democracy and economy such as Mexico's need," he says. "The next generation of reforms should focus on providing teachers opportunities to enhance their skills in using these resources at a high level of effectiveness."

As the Ed School group gets back in the vans at the end of a nearly 12-hour day of talking about and explaining their work (most of the time wearing headphones for the translators), they feel that it went well and that have learned as much from the collaboration as the Mexicans have.

"I was inspired by the vision of the Secretariat of Public Education for the Mexican people," says McCartney. "They understand the importance of education for their democracy, and they plan to invest in policies and practices that work."

Hungry Like the Wolves
Shanghai teachers cast a WIDE net with online course

The wolves got her thinking. When Meibao Wang, a teacher in China, started teaching her unit on wolves, she asked her students a straightforward question: What do you know about wolves? From most students she got back straightforward answers: they described what the animals looked like and where they lived. But it was one student's answer that made her rethink what she was doing.

"I am a wolf from the north," the student said.

Wang, inspired by this student's willingness to think outside the box, knew what she had to do: utilize what she had learned in an online course she had recently taken called Teaching for Understanding, known as TfU, taught by WIDE World, an online professional development program designed at the Ed School and currently used in about 70 countries.

"The student's answer was unexpected, but interesting," Wang said. "So I invited the student to complete his story."

“A good teacher should be able to capture those 'teachable' moments which naturally occur and use them to lead students to deeper, wilder
thinking and understanding."
-- Meibao Wang

The boy did. "I am a wolf from the north. I feel very lonely because all of the members of my family were killed," he said. "I had nothing to eat so I had to eat snow…Now I am in danger. Please help me."

Wang finished the unit by asking the other students to also imagine they were wolves.

"A good teacher should be able to capture those 'teachable' moments which naturally occur," she said, "and use them to lead students to deeper, wilder thinking and understanding."

Wang is just one of hundreds of teachers across Shanghai who are embracing this philosophy, thanks in part to educational reform efforts in China that are doing away with the traditional, rote method of teaching, and to a collaboration with WIDE World designed to give educators more studentcentered teaching skills that they can bring back to Shanghai's elementary and secondary classrooms.

Last January, 250 public school teachers from 100 schools in Shanghai began taking the online course,
translated into Mandarin. Another 170 teachers followed in October. Qin Jiang, Ed.M.'05, project manager for the China program, said that so far, results have been positive: 98 percent feel that the course was better than other professional development courses they had taken and 84 percent feel it had significantly or dramatically improved their teaching abilities. Because of these results, Jiang said the Shanghai Education Commission, which provides financial support for the teachers, decided to continue their funding. Phase two, going on now, involves having some of the original teachers take an advanced course, as well as training some of them to be apprentice online coaches. (In all WIDE programs, coaches work with study groups that develop with each course.) In phase three, the apprentice coaches will lead the online courses.

Jiang, who was born in Suzhou, a city about 60 miles west of Shanghai, said the teachers are "fascinated" by the program and said they are eager to try new, more constructivist instruction
models.

"They see the alignment between the course ideas and their new curriculum. That makes them feel that these ideas are relevant," she said. "Also, many teachers feel that the course provides them with specific guidelines for instruction planning and practice. Some teachers reported real differences that they can see in their classes when they tried some course ideas. For example, students are more engaged in learning and take ownership of learning. Learning is not something that the teacher wants them to do, but it becomes something that they want to do themselves."

Based on this excitement, David Zarowin, executive director for WIDE World, said he hopes the program expands to other parts of the country, including Beijing, Fuzhou, and Guangzhou, as well as Hong Kong.

"Everywhere we have gone in China, education leaders have been quite clear that Teaching for Understanding is well aligned with the education reforms underway in China," he said. "TfU is
centered on developing the critical thinking and problem-solving skills that Chinese educators say students will need to be effective citizens in the early twenty-fi rst century. Given that alignment and our very positive start in Shanghai, we are hopeful that WIDE World's courses will meet a growing need across the country."

Metro Babies
A look at the development of immigrant babies in one U.S. city

At first it was just a study, a means to getting information, but after awhile, Professor Hiro Yoshikawa started getting invited to birthday parties and family dinners. That's what happens when you work with babies.

For the past few years, Yoshikawa has been following 350 low-income Chinese, Mexican, and Dominican families in New York City in an attempt to understand the psychological, economic, and policy lives of immigrant parents as they relate to their infant's progress.

"This is one of the first studies to look at the development of babies in immigrant families," Yoshikawa said of the study, called the Metro Baby Project. "Almost all studies of immigrants have been ones that start with youth."

Families were initially recruited in maternity wards in public hospitals in Manhattan, the day a baby was born, or the day after. During a 40-minute interview, they answered questions about where the parents work and how they make ends meet. Families were then visited by Yoshikawa and his colleagues at home, some as often as every three weeks, for observation. All families are revisited when the baby is 14, 24, and 36 months.

"You develop a rapport pretty quickly, especially when you're not coming at them with a survey, but at their home, trying to figure out what their every day experiences are," said Yoshikawa, who recently came to Harvard from New York University. Currently the visits are every 10 to 12 weeks apart.

Spending time with families in their homes is a key part of the study. Armed with video cameras, Yoshikawa and his collaborators observed parents (mostly mothers) in both unstructured and structured play to see how they "parent" and how the infants respond.

"One specific task was reading a book. We'd have a session with two different kinds of books, one pulling on emotions, with kids with diff erent facial expressions," he said. "The other has a variety of objects that pulls for the naming of objects and interaction around numbers and size."

They also watch as the parent and baby play with the baby's favorite toys, then with toys provided by the study (to make it universal across families). They noted how often the parent looked at the baby, what the gestures were, how long they touched and how often, and what the parent and baby's posture were in relation to one another.

When they study is over, Yoshikawa said he hopes it will materialize into more than just a paper.

"All throughout the Metro Baby Project, we have been disseminating emerging information to organizations working with immigrant families in New York," he said. "We plan to extend that dissemination with information on the economic, parenting, parental work, and policy implications of our data that will be of use to a variety of community-based organizations, advocacy groups, and policymakers working with immigrant and ethnically diverse families in poverty across the nation."

Currently, although the study is still ongoing -- as of December, most of the babies were about 24 months old -- and it's too early to really make assessments, he said there have been some notable observations.

"So far, about 80 percent of our Chinese families have sent their babies back to China," he said. "They plan on having the babies come back by the time they start school. Many [of the parents] are undocumented and owe $60,000 to $80,000 to the smugglers and so have to work 60 to 80 hours a week."

As a result, Yoshikawa said they are in the process of setting up a partnership with Chinese counterparts who will observe the babies in China to see how they are being reared, mostly by grandparents.

Asked why he got interested in this project, which can be difficult to maintain over time, especially with some families moving from apartment to apartment, he said immigrant infants are an untapped research pool.

"We got excited about looking at cultures that hadn't been studied much. The development of babies of Mexican families in New England, for instance, has almost never been studied," he said. "When it to child development and policy for education issues, the zero-to-three population has really been neglected."