Great Teachers Don't Teach. In a conversation on LinkedIn, one person asked, "What are the characteristics of an effective teacher? " I read quite a few excellent remarks that describe what such a teacher does to be effective. I couldn't help thinking about some of my best teachers. I had an amazing psychology professor in college. He was on fire every class period and his enthusiasm was contagious. But the things I remember most are the psychological experiments in which we participated.
My psychology professor was an effective teacher because he provided experiences that created long-term memories. "I appreciate all of the comments that have been made so far. My experience is that good teachers care about students. All of this is good but great teachers engineer learning experiences that maneuver the students into the driver's seat and then the teachers get out of the way. In The Classroom Long past are the times when we teach content just in case a student might need it. Taking Action. SmartBlog on Education - 3 ways to make career exploration cool again - SmartBrief SmartBlogs SmartBlogs.
In many schools and districts, career education has gotten a “bad rap.” Sometimes, vocational- and career-exploration activities are only offered to students who aren’t attending college. Due to this, career exploration can carry a negative stigma that seems silly and even detrimental. But the common core’s focus on career and college readiness may change all that. Schools and districts across the country are revamping their internship and career exploration programs with awesome results. A recent study published in Phi Delta Kappan found that students participating in career exploration activities generally were more likely than nonparticipants to graduate from high school and to prepare for and enroll in postsecondary education. Further, the 2011 Harvard GSE report, 2011 Citizen’s League Student Speak Out Project, and the 2007 Project Tomorrow efforts have all reframed school-wide conversations about careers.
Not sure how to begin? 1. 2. 3. Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction. What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they'll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.
The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable.
Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell "neighborhood" properly and whatnot isn't a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn't going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about. Debunking the Case for National Standards. Dialogue with the Gates Foundation: Can Schools Defeat Poverty by Ignoring It? - Living in Dialogue. Cognitive and Emotional Development Through Play. We sometimes neglect to mention a very basic yet powerful method of cognitive and emotional development, for children and adults alike: Play. Dr. David Elkind, author of The Power of Play: Learning That Comes Naturally, discusses the need to build a more “playful culture” in this great article brought to you thanks to our collaboration with Greater Good Magazine. - Alvaro Can We Play?
– By Dr. Play is rapidly disappearing from our homes, our schools, and our neighborhoods. But the problem goes well beyond obesity. In infancy and early childhood, play is the activity through which children learn to recognize colors and shapes, tastes and sounds‚ the very building blocks of reality. With play on the decline, we risk losing these and many other benefits. Play and development Years of research has confirmed the value of play. A large body of research evidence also supports the value and importance of particular types of play. The perfect storm. Cerf Goes Public About Student Test Scores and Teacher Evaluations. The Christie administration yesterday continued to fill in the details of next year's new teacher evaluation system, including how -- and how much -- test scores will be used to determine final ratings.
Plenty of questions remain. But by presenting their proposed regulations for the new system to the BOE, state Education Commissioner Chris Cerf and his top staff took an important first step, putting specific percentages to how much state test scores and other factors would count toward teacher ratings. For teachers in grades and subjects that are evaluated by state tests, such as elementary school language arts and math, student progress on those exams would count for 35 percent of an educator's rating in the first year, officials said. The balance of the rating would come from supervisors’ evaluations of teacher practice (50 percent) and other undefined achievement measures (15 percent).
Click to enlarge. “Why don’t we slow this down and test the SGP?” Videotaping teachers the right way (not the Gates way) This piece, written by teacher Larry Ferlazzo, provides important context to a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in which teachers are being videotaped while giving lessons and then evaluated by outsiders. Ferlazzo, who teaches English at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, explains why he thinks the Gates project takes the wrong approach and describes a different kind of videotaping exercise at his school that he finds useful. Ferlazzo writes a popular resource-sharing blog, and his third book, “Student Responsibility and Engagement in Your Classroom: A Practical Guide to Classroom Management and Instruction,” will be published this year.
He is a member of the Teacher Leaders Network. This piece appeared on the Education Week Teacher website. By Larry Ferlazzo "Today is an opportunity for you to challenge and push me to become a better teacher, and a time for you to challenge and push yourselves to be better learners. " A Transformative Experience "Mr. "Mr. What do international tests really show about U.S. student performance? Executive summary Education policymakers and analysts express great concern about the performance of U.S. students on international tests. Education reformers frequently invoke the relatively poor performance of U.S. students to justify school policy changes. In December 2012, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) released national average results from the 2011 administration of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan promptly issued a press release calling the results “unacceptable,” saying that they “underscore the urgency of accelerating achievement in secondary school and the need to close large and persistent achievement gaps,” and calling particular attention to the fact that the 8th-grade scores in mathematics for U.S. students failed to improve since the previous administration of the TIMSS. Part I. Upon release of the 2011 TIMSS results, for example, U.S. Teachers - Will We Ever Learn? Get Involved | TAG Philly. We are pleased to present PA gubernatorial candidate Allyson Schwartz’s responses to our follow-up questionnaire. She is the first current candidate to respond to the second phase of our Candidate Report Card Campaign. We will post additional responses as we receive them. 1. Philadelphia schools are struggling to make up for a $304 million dollar budget gap this year, and the prognosis for next year does not look good (The Notebook).
What do you think the best solution(s) are for the School District of Philadelphia’s financial problems? The financial crisis in the School District of Philadelphia has been driven largely by two factors: (1) the extreme budget cuts imposed on the district by Governor Corbett, and (2) the rapid growth of charter schools, which has drained vital resources. As the former Democratic Chair of the Pennsylvania Senate Education Committee, I fought for fair funding for our public schools. 2. 3. 4. Children do not remember the test, they remember the teacher. 5. 6.