- StumbleUpon. No homework in Finland. See this hat? Tis' my cat. SCORE 135 the creation of the internet SCORE 148 I'm not even mad... That was amazing. "exotic" SCORE 200 A reader lives a thousand lives... Hey dude can you pass me a beer? I hope she said "yes"... Love at first fight. See The Teacher’s Resignation Video That 280,000 People Have Already Watched. Meet America's Only Restaurant Owner With Down Syndrome - An Inspiring Young Man! If students designed their own school… it would look like this. Student Peter Boyce(By Charles Tsai) “It’s crazy that in a system that is meant to teach and help the youth there is no voice from the youth at all.”
That’s the opening line in a video called “If students designed their own schools,” about The Independent Project, a high school semester designed and implemented entirely by students. What did it look like? No quizzes. No tests. The Independent Project started in 2011 at Monument Mountain Regional High School, a public school in Massachusetts, after a student named Sam Levin advanced an idea about students creating their own learning environment in order to find the engagement and mastery he felt were lacking in many teacher-designed classes. In this model, teachers serve as mentors and coaches, not as direct instructors, while students pose questions and find ways to answer them.
After the first semester, an evaluation was undertaken and changes were made to the model. Here’s Tsai’s video: How Math Got Its Groove Back. 49913Dance by NumbersCarrie Lewis, a STEM specialist in Lynchburg, Virginia, explains the lesson plan that she and fellow teacher Kelly Steele devised to teach their fifth grade students number patterns. 2013-01-16 13:35:00disabledssmB_MtgJ_kfalse This is an edited version of a video produced by Jill Granger. To view the original video, click here. Carrie Lewis and Kelly Steele’s fifth grade students slide and spin across the classroom floor, doing the hustle, the robot and the running man.
While it may look at first glance like goofing off, these students are actually dancing for a higher cause…math. Lewis, a STEM specialist for Virginia’s Lynchburg city schools, and Steele, who teaches gifted education in Bedford county, Virginia, are both math enthusiasts eager to instill in their students a love of the subject. And dancing, they hoped, might be just the thing to help tackle a common fifth-grade learning deficit — number patterns. “Dances are patterns,” Lewis said. Analyzing the Dance: Why Creative Teaching is Essential For the Information Age | Education on GOOD. There’s a belief in this country that every student should graduate from high school with the same standard set of knowledge. This standard curriculum is lengthy, and states spend many years—and plenty of money—creating fancy bullet-pointed lists of the subjects students are expected to know. Sadly, the list of facts and formulas students need to perform well on a standardized test is freakishly small in comparison.
And, because education policymakers have narrowed teachers' focus to these few topics, it becomes tempting to resort to drill-and-kill teaching methods that cover information in a generic, surface-level way. Unsurprisingly, instead of fostering curiosity—which is much more important in the long term than rote memorization—this approach causes students to tune out. My experience as a classroom teacher has shown me that teenagers are interested in almost anything taught well and with passion.
They’re especially engaged by creative, real-world applications of knowledge. Researching Lost Children. Evidence in my case study continues to mount … strangely. Though the girls exhibit clear signs of a shared delusion — the creation of an imaginary mother figure who protected them during their years of isolation — still, there are still some hard-to-explain details I’ve found, frankly, unsettling. 1. Survival. Most of all: how were these children able to live in isolation for five years?
2. 3. Conclusion: Did the girls have contact with one or more adults during their stay in the Helvetia cabin? I must investigate further. Why A Principal Created His Own Currency : Planet Money. David Kestenbaum/NPR Shawn Rux took over as principal of MS 53, a New York City middle school, last year. At the time, 50 or 60 kids were absent every day. You could understand why they stayed away: The school was chaos. Twenty-two teachers had quit, the entire office staff had quit, and hundreds of kids had been suspended.
"It was in a bad place," Rux says. Rux decided he needed to create incentives for kids to come to school. He handed out raffle tickets to anyone who showed up to school on time. It worked. "It was ... like, 'Get out of my way, I'm trying to get into school,' " Rux says. Rux also created his own currency. The principal also stands outside school every morning, greeting the students as they show up. "I like this school," Wander Rodriguez says. The school went from an F to a C. The school is in Far Rockaway, Queens — one of the areas hardest hit by the storm. After the storm, after school started up again, Rux's goal was to get attendance back to 90 percent.
Graphic Organizers. A free school under a bridge in India. Altaf Qadri / AP Founder of a free school for slum children Rajesh Kumar Sharma, second from right, and Laxmi Chandra, right, write on black boards, painted on a building wall, at a free school run under a metro bridge in New Delhi, India. At least 30 children living in the nearby slums have been receiving free education from this school for the last three years. Related content: Rajesh Kumar Sharma, teach Somnath, an underprivileged Indian slum child at the school. Students help to keep the school clean. Poorest pupils 'weaker at maths' 22 November 2012Last updated at 22:12 ET The scheme focussed on pupils aged six and seven The poorest children are twice as likely to struggle at maths early on at primary school, research suggests. But a study found a short but intense tutoring scheme enables struggling children to make strong gains.
The report on 47,237 children with weak numeracy levels in England's Every Child Counts scheme found 73% went on to meet average levels. The analysis was for the scheme's annual report The tutoring involved half an hour of daily tuition over three months. The scheme was originally managed and funded, directly, by the Department for Education.
It is now run by Edge Hill University and has developed into two schemes, Numbers Count and 1stClass@Number. Instead of being automatically offered to schools, head teachers now decide whether they want to buy it in as a means of helping their pupils. 'Sustained progress' And, after just 3.7 months of support, they made average gains of 15.7 months. STEM Students Must Be Taught to Fail. Elizabeth Gerber is a public voices fellow with the OpEd Project and the Breed junior chair of design in the McCormick School of Engineering and School of Communication at Northwestern University. She is the founder of Design for America. Within minutes of losing the presidential election, the Republican party was back on its feet, and preparing for the 2014 election cycle.
In that way they were like most competitors. Star running backs, for instance, are tackled a dozen times in an ordinary 60 minute football game. Because falling is part of any competitive game, coaches teach their athletes how to fall in ways that prevent permanent injury and make it easier to get up and back into the game. As a mechanical engineering professor at Northwestern University, I believe that that's precisely what we should be teaching our students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects: how to fail. [Check out the U.S. [See a collection of political cartoons on the economy.] Please Stop Using the Phrase 'Achievement Gap' | Education on GOOD.
Recently, I've been more and more troubled with the phrase "achievement gap. " I was a 1999 Teach For America corps member and recently, in my occasional work with the organization, I've begun to share my concerns about what this concept suggests. Because of America's racial history and legacy, the cross-racial comparison that holds up white student achievement as the universally standard goal is problematic. Further, the term "achievement gap" is inaccurate because it blames the historically marginalized, under-served victims of poor schooling and holds whiteness and wealth as models of excellence. And, as with all misnomers, the thinking that undergirds the achievement gap only speaks of academic outcomes, not the conditions that led to those outcomes, nor does it acknowledge that the outcomes are a consequence of those conditions.
In Beloved, Toni Morrison taught us that usually "definitions belong to the definers—not the defined. " Indeed! I encourage you to watch your mouth. American Teachers Do More Work for Less Pay Than Their International Peers | Education on GOOD. American Teachers Do More Work for Less Pay Than Their International Peers American Teachers Do More Work for Less Pay Than Their International Peers zoom with mousewheel or pinch Ever wonder how the hours American teachers work and the salary they earn compares to teachers in other industrialized nations? Well, the picture's not pretty. In this infographic courtesy of the Future Journalism Project, American educators work the most hours of all industrialized nations, but are the fifth lowest paid after 15 years on the job.
Only Luxembourg, Hungary, Iceland, and Norway pay their teachers less. And how do we compare to the country that's number one in the world in education according to international tests, Finland? Hat tip Alexander Russo. Why Education Without Creativity Isn't Enough. Phaneesh Murthy, CEO of Indian outsourcing company iGate Patni. | Photo by Ritam Banerjee Last April, when sharing a stage at Facebook with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, President Obama summed up the conventional wisdom on what's needed to shape American minds for the global marketplace. "We've got to do such a better job when it comes to STEM education," he said.
"That's how we're going to stay competitive for the future. " If we could just tighten standards and lean harder on the STEM disciplines--science, technology, engineering, mathematics--we'd better our rigorous rivals in India and China, and get our economy firing on all cylinders. As with much conventional wisdom, this is conventional in the worst sense of that word.
If you want the truth, talk to the competition. "In India, it takes engineers two to three years to recover from the damage of the education system. " Murthy will tell you that the outsourcing industry is not some unstoppable force: It's hitting real limits. Or don't. Making Teachers Nerdy. Reading Graphic Organizers and Printables.
Creative Writing Exercises. Subjects. Rather Than Reinventing Education By Teaching A Million People At Once, Can We Perfect Teaching One Person At A Time? We've written a few times about innovation in education, and I've pointed out that I think the real breakthrough opportunity is in figuring out ways to get "students" to teach the subject matter themselves. As I noted, it was only once I had to teach certain subjects that I fully understood them -- because my students kept probing and asking more questions, which forced me to go beyond "just getting by" with my knowledge of the subject, and to dig deeper and gain better understanding.
And it feels like there's an opportunity to use technology to make that possible -- and to somehow flip the equation, so that education is less about being "lectured" and more about students learning by teaching themselves and each other. You can understand, in theory, why that seems desirable. After all, if you can find the absolute best teacher of a subject, wouldn't it be great to allow anyone and everyone to sit in on his or her lectures? Reshaping Learning from the Ground Up. Alvin Toffler tells us what's wrong -- and right -- with public education. Forty years after he and his wife, Heidi, set the world alight with Future Shock, Alvin Toffler remains a tough assessor of our nation's social and technological prospects.
Though he's best known for his work discussing the myriad ramifications of the digital revolution, he also loves to speak about the education system that is shaping the hearts and minds of America's future. We met with him near his office in Los Angeles, where the celebrated septuagenarian remains a clear and radical thinker. Credit: This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.
You've been writing about our educational system for decades. Alvin Toffler: Shut down the public education system. That's pretty radical. I'm roughly quoting Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who said, "We don't need to reform the system; we need to replace the system. " Why not just readjust what we have in place now? Yes. Top 14 websites for students. Six Things Education Can Learn From Neuroscience | Science. Neuroscience studies a very complex system: the brain. Much has been learned through formal research of the brain, especially due to the advent of brain imaging technologies which afford increased breadth of research using human subjects. That said, what we know remains very limited, given the complexities of both the organ and the practical application of research findings.
However, we can point to six findings that give us new and profound insight into our grey matter. 1. Memory is not unitary from either a behavioral or neuroanatomical standpoint. [Squire, L. R. (1992)].p There exist multiple memory systems within the brain—neuroscientists have actually known this part for a while, but they didn’t know precisely what it meant. 2. Historically it was thought that the two types of memory merely competed with each other to form the basis of “habit learning.” 3. 4. This finding flies in the face of a “avoid any and all distractions” approach to education. 5. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Op-Ed: We Should Make Teachers the ‘Agents of Change’