Contrary to public opinion, schools don't cause the achievement gap, and cannot close it on their own. We must not let society off the hook, noting that raising the average income of lower-income people by $4,000 a year would go far in closing the gap. Yet schools still have the biggest potential to help and when they fail to act, children become more disadvantaged. Among the promising school interventions that work— used best in combination—include preschool programs, smaller class size especially in the early years, use of cooperative strategies, personalized learning, extended time for learning, extracurricular activities targeted particularly for underachieving students, and, finally, providing high-quality teachers who understand the students, respect them, and believe that the students can learn.
The place to fix the 9th grade problem is in preschool. "The hill gets higher as we climb it . . . It is time to see the problem as the moral and ethical issue it is."
What do you think?
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Are two teachers better than one?
More planning time for teachers will mean changes to the length of the school day for middle-schoolers in neighboring Jordan and Canyons districts.
Beginning next year, all Jordan middle schools will start two hours later on Fridays to give teachers paid time for team planning. Canyons middle schools will have the option of starting 60 to 90 minutes late or ending early one day a week, pending board approval.
The change in pickup and drop-off times will be an adjustment for busy families. For the districts, it means tweaking bus schedules.
But team-teaching isn't new. Other states have long cultivated so-called Professional Learning Communities. Utah's own Granite District has been doing it for eight years.
Elsewhere in Utah, though, teachers have pow-wowed on their own time and their own dime, said Michael Sirois, student achievement director at Canyons. "This is our way of formalizing and encouraging more collaboration. Teachers are accustomed to working in isolation. That's not the model we want here. We want teamwork."
Teachers at Crescent View Middle School are already believers.
The Sandy school adopted the "two-heads-are-better-than-one" approach in 2007, using trust lands money to pay teachers for an extra hour after school.
The program is voluntary, but most teachers participate, which "speaks to their commitment," said the school's principal, Greg Leavitt.
click here for the rest of the article
After presenting a workshop with a fellow teacher, this writer can say that he surely discussed the notion of team teaching with his colleague. The concept is one that can take the students to the next level, as well as energize the teacher as they team up to present a topic, a lesson, or a unit.
Try it, link up with someone, tell us what your experience was like.
Beginning next year, all Jordan middle schools will start two hours later on Fridays to give teachers paid time for team planning. Canyons middle schools will have the option of starting 60 to 90 minutes late or ending early one day a week, pending board approval.
The change in pickup and drop-off times will be an adjustment for busy families. For the districts, it means tweaking bus schedules.
But team-teaching isn't new. Other states have long cultivated so-called Professional Learning Communities. Utah's own Granite District has been doing it for eight years.
Elsewhere in Utah, though, teachers have pow-wowed on their own time and their own dime, said Michael Sirois, student achievement director at Canyons. "This is our way of formalizing and encouraging more collaboration. Teachers are accustomed to working in isolation. That's not the model we want here. We want teamwork."
Teachers at Crescent View Middle School are already believers.
The Sandy school adopted the "two-heads-are-better-than-one" approach in 2007, using trust lands money to pay teachers for an extra hour after school.
The program is voluntary, but most teachers participate, which "speaks to their commitment," said the school's principal, Greg Leavitt.
click here for the rest of the article
After presenting a workshop with a fellow teacher, this writer can say that he surely discussed the notion of team teaching with his colleague. The concept is one that can take the students to the next level, as well as energize the teacher as they team up to present a topic, a lesson, or a unit.
Try it, link up with someone, tell us what your experience was like.
Back to the Basics
Sometimes we think that we need to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes, the answer is as simple as a phone call away.
Pinellas school officials acknowledge that student behavior is an issue, but they say they're working hard on new ways to tame unruly students.
Early in the school year, the two directors of school operations for high schools meet with each principal to identify goals based on data. One school might choose to reduce its number of referrals for defiance and insubordination, for example, while another might decide to reduce its out-of-school suspension rate.
The district gives each school leeway to choose a discipline program it thinks will work best. Some schools, including Countryside High, have ninth-grade learning communities that help kids transition from middle school. Several others, including Dixie Hollins High, have adopted a program called Positive Behavior Support that concentrates on preventing unwanted behaviors and building relationships.
At Lakewood, where in-school suspensions topped 1,378 last year, administrators decided to adopt a detention program that requires kids who are repeatedly defiant or disrespectful to stay on campus until as late as 6 p.m. under the supervision of two classroom teachers.
Concern over a high number of referrals — 3,100 in 2007-08 — led Lakewood officials to begin requiring teachers to contact parents when kids commit less serious offenses like being tardy and using obscene language.
But school principal Dennis Duda says there's more to it than enforcing rules. It's easy to punish, Duda says. What he's looking for is a change in behavior.
Duda, who has been principal at Lakewood for four years, makes it a point to be visible on campus. During class changes, he stands in the school's hub, checking for dress code violations and electronic devices.
He requires teachers to be visible as well, stationing them at classroom doors to curtail any rowdy behavior before it has a chance to come inside with the students.
When the final bell rings, all doors are shut and locked, forcing students to knock to get in. Duda says the practice has reduced tardiness considerably.
He likes the fact that most of the school's 1,575 students live in the area, which has a long-standing reputation for being economically and culturally diverse.
And despite a decrease in diversity among the student population, he thinks the return to a neighborhood school system has been good for Lakewood, knitting the community together and increasing the opportunity for parental involvement.
Click here for the entire article
Pinellas school officials acknowledge that student behavior is an issue, but they say they're working hard on new ways to tame unruly students.
Early in the school year, the two directors of school operations for high schools meet with each principal to identify goals based on data. One school might choose to reduce its number of referrals for defiance and insubordination, for example, while another might decide to reduce its out-of-school suspension rate.
The district gives each school leeway to choose a discipline program it thinks will work best. Some schools, including Countryside High, have ninth-grade learning communities that help kids transition from middle school. Several others, including Dixie Hollins High, have adopted a program called Positive Behavior Support that concentrates on preventing unwanted behaviors and building relationships.
At Lakewood, where in-school suspensions topped 1,378 last year, administrators decided to adopt a detention program that requires kids who are repeatedly defiant or disrespectful to stay on campus until as late as 6 p.m. under the supervision of two classroom teachers.
Concern over a high number of referrals — 3,100 in 2007-08 — led Lakewood officials to begin requiring teachers to contact parents when kids commit less serious offenses like being tardy and using obscene language.
But school principal Dennis Duda says there's more to it than enforcing rules. It's easy to punish, Duda says. What he's looking for is a change in behavior.
Duda, who has been principal at Lakewood for four years, makes it a point to be visible on campus. During class changes, he stands in the school's hub, checking for dress code violations and electronic devices.
He requires teachers to be visible as well, stationing them at classroom doors to curtail any rowdy behavior before it has a chance to come inside with the students.
When the final bell rings, all doors are shut and locked, forcing students to knock to get in. Duda says the practice has reduced tardiness considerably.
He likes the fact that most of the school's 1,575 students live in the area, which has a long-standing reputation for being economically and culturally diverse.
And despite a decrease in diversity among the student population, he thinks the return to a neighborhood school system has been good for Lakewood, knitting the community together and increasing the opportunity for parental involvement.
Click here for the entire article
Students give up wheels for their own two feet.
LECCO, Italy — Each morning, about 450 students travel along 17 school bus routes to 10 elementary schools in this lakeside city at the southern tip of Lake Como. There are zero school busesIn 2003, to confront the triple threats of childhood obesity, local traffic jams and — most important — a rise in global greenhouse gases abetted by car emissions, an environmental group here proposed a retro-radical concept: children should walk to school.
They set up a piedibus (literally foot-bus in Italian) — a bus route with a driver but no vehicle. Each morning a mix of paid staff members and parental volunteers in fluorescent yellow vests lead lines of walking students along Lecco’s twisting streets to the schools’ gates, Pied Piper-style, stopping here and there as their flock expands.
At the Carducci School, 100 children, or more than half of the students, now take walking buses. Many of them were previously driven in cars. Giulio Greppi, a 9-year-old with shaggy blond hair, said he had been driven about a third of a mile each way until he started taking the piedibus. “I get to see my friends and we feel special because we know it’s good for the environment,” he said.
Although the routes are each generally less than a mile, the town’s piedibuses have so far eliminated more than 100,000 miles of car travel and, in principle, prevented thousands of tons of greenhouse gases from entering the air, Dario Pesenti, the town’s environment auditor, estimates.
The number of children who are driven to school over all is rising in the United States and Europe, experts on both continents say, making up a sizable chunk of transportation’s contribution to greenhouse-gas emissions. The “school run” made up 18 percent of car trips by urban residents of Britain last year, a national survey showed.
click here for the rest of the article
Bermuda could learn from this model. The Talking Teacher remembers walking to school every morning,and then to "Nanna's " house in the afternoon. Later on, after getting on and off of the bus, yes, the bus. Some carry their children to and fro as if their prescence on the bus will cause them to break out into some horrid, horrific desease, but yes, the bus, and it is free now also. But you may not be able to walk to all of your schools, but the bus route will allow for a few steps, we used to be a society of healthy walkers, lets get back to it. One step at a time.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Join an organization!
Let me take this time to encourage you to join some type of professional organization. Why you may ask? Simple, if you want to be on top of the latest trends in education, feel the effects of collaborating with the leaders in your field, as well as getting motivation and fired up to tackle any problem with research based fact? JOIN!! I look forward every month to my copy of the ASCD journal, called Educational Leadership. It is chock full of the information that I need to brush up my skills and to bring cutting edge methods to my students. Whatever your area, I encourage you to join the association that goes with your area, here are a few: (click on them to go to the sites-not an exhaustive list)
ASCD
NSTA National Science Teachers Association
NEA National Educators Association
NCTE National Council of Teachers of English
National Middle School Ass.
High School Association
ASCD
NSTA National Science Teachers Association
NEA National Educators Association
NCTE National Council of Teachers of English
National Middle School Ass.
High School Association
Can we learn from them?
Briefly, Why Taiwan's 1st in Math
Presenters Shu-Wei Wu and Mary Kay McGurl in the session, "Academic Excellence: Learning from Taiwanese Excellence," presented a compare/contrast of some of the defining qualities of U.S. and Taiwanese schools and education.
Notably, in Taiwan, parents pay for everything. Lunch, materials, uniforms, school--if they can pay, they do. If they can't pay, students are guaranteed an education from grades 1–9. Also, all K and preK learning must be arranged by parents through private institutions. In terms of curriculum, Taiwanese students don't take electives--it's all core curriculum, and subjects are not sequenced by categories. For example, math is taught as math, not algebra, geometry, and calculus.
Students in Taiwan overall have a strong work ethic, a lot of support from parents, excellent educational resources (facilities and materials), national standards, mentor-master teachers that follow them for several years, maximized learning time (9-hour days, longer school year), high
accountability (public rankings), a core curriculum with much repetition, year-round assignments, and individualized learning (for example, Cram Schools that focus on one area of learning).
So of these attributes that contribute to Taiwan's high PISA rankings, which might be readily incorporated into the ways schools work here in Bermuda?
Presenters Shu-Wei Wu and Mary Kay McGurl in the session, "Academic Excellence: Learning from Taiwanese Excellence," presented a compare/contrast of some of the defining qualities of U.S. and Taiwanese schools and education.
Notably, in Taiwan, parents pay for everything. Lunch, materials, uniforms, school--if they can pay, they do. If they can't pay, students are guaranteed an education from grades 1–9. Also, all K and preK learning must be arranged by parents through private institutions. In terms of curriculum, Taiwanese students don't take electives--it's all core curriculum, and subjects are not sequenced by categories. For example, math is taught as math, not algebra, geometry, and calculus.
Students in Taiwan overall have a strong work ethic, a lot of support from parents, excellent educational resources (facilities and materials), national standards, mentor-master teachers that follow them for several years, maximized learning time (9-hour days, longer school year), high
accountability (public rankings), a core curriculum with much repetition, year-round assignments, and individualized learning (for example, Cram Schools that focus on one area of learning).
So of these attributes that contribute to Taiwan's high PISA rankings, which might be readily incorporated into the ways schools work here in Bermuda?
Obama:Bad Teachers must be taken out
(taken from the Associated Press)
WASHINGTON (AP) — If the nation's schools are going to see improvement, President Barack Obama says there has to be a way to ease bad teachers out of the classroom.
Obama was responding Thursday to a question from a Philadelphia-area schoolteacher. The woman looked away and refused to answer when Obama asked if she'd seen any teachers whose work was so bad she wouldn't want her own children in that class.
Obama said some people just aren't meant to be teachers.
He also said there needs to be other ways to evaluate teachers besides standardized tests. He said those tests can't measure progress in a struggling school, and that they represent the biggest flaw in the No Child Left Behind program.
Obama said that if teachers are forced to teach based solely on a test, fewer students will be inspired to learn.
What is your opinion? Leave a comment.
WASHINGTON (AP) — If the nation's schools are going to see improvement, President Barack Obama says there has to be a way to ease bad teachers out of the classroom.
Obama was responding Thursday to a question from a Philadelphia-area schoolteacher. The woman looked away and refused to answer when Obama asked if she'd seen any teachers whose work was so bad she wouldn't want her own children in that class.
Obama said some people just aren't meant to be teachers.
He also said there needs to be other ways to evaluate teachers besides standardized tests. He said those tests can't measure progress in a struggling school, and that they represent the biggest flaw in the No Child Left Behind program.
Obama said that if teachers are forced to teach based solely on a test, fewer students will be inspired to learn.
What is your opinion? Leave a comment.
Technology in the Classroom-Is there room for it?
Many educators are of the mindset that every bit of technology should be banned from school and should not be used while the child is in school, read the following article:
Schools Seen as Inhibiting Student Tech. Use
Students are using personal technology tools more readily to study subject matter, collaborate with classmates, and complete assigments than they were several years ago, but they are generally asked to “power down” at school and abandon the electronic resources they rely on for learning outside of class, according to a survey of educators, parents, and teenagers.
Teachers, for the most part, are not taking advantage of the tools that middle and high school students have widely adopted for home and school purposes, according to the sixth annual report of the Speak Up National Research Project. Those students should be given a more formal role in determining how new technology—particularly mobile devices, such as smartphones, and Web 2.0 tools, like social-networking sites–can be tapped to improve schooling, a report on the survey findings
suggests.
click here for the complete read.
Some podacsts that you may find on iTunes, or someother podcast feed that you may find helpful in your classroom are:
-Moving at the spee of creativity
-SMARTBoard lessons podcast
-Teachers connecting podcast
- Podcast for Teachers (techpod)
Times are changing, there is soooo much that we can do as educators to incorporate technology in our classes which may, in turn, encourage more of our students, which tend to be more tech. savvy than ourselves to become a part of the class room learning process. Read the article, leave your thoughts.
Schools Seen as Inhibiting Student Tech. Use
Students are using personal technology tools more readily to study subject matter, collaborate with classmates, and complete assigments than they were several years ago, but they are generally asked to “power down” at school and abandon the electronic resources they rely on for learning outside of class, according to a survey of educators, parents, and teenagers.
Teachers, for the most part, are not taking advantage of the tools that middle and high school students have widely adopted for home and school purposes, according to the sixth annual report of the Speak Up National Research Project. Those students should be given a more formal role in determining how new technology—particularly mobile devices, such as smartphones, and Web 2.0 tools, like social-networking sites–can be tapped to improve schooling, a report on the survey findings
suggests.
click here for the complete read.
Some podacsts that you may find on iTunes, or someother podcast feed that you may find helpful in your classroom are:
-Moving at the spee of creativity
-SMARTBoard lessons podcast
-Teachers connecting podcast
- Podcast for Teachers (techpod)
Times are changing, there is soooo much that we can do as educators to incorporate technology in our classes which may, in turn, encourage more of our students, which tend to be more tech. savvy than ourselves to become a part of the class room learning process. Read the article, leave your thoughts.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
