Testing, the Chinese Way
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Leigh Wells
American education’s “no test” philosophy for young children has come under assault as government programs strongly promote the practice, which is widespread in Asia.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Friday, September 10, 2010
NYTimes - Back to School: New York Times Resources for English and the Arts
Back to School: New York Times Resources for English and the Arts: "New York Times and Learning Network resources to help you plan for the school year in composition, literature, journalism, media studies and fine and performance arts.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Tween Teacher - Blogging with Middle Schoolers: Frontloading and First Steps
Blogging with Middle Schoolers: Frontloading and First Steps: "
So I just finished introducing blogging to my middle school classes. They are hooked, as each year before them was hooked. I use it as a substitute for Reading Logs, that dreaded love-of-reading killer which causes eye rolls in many a Language Arts class. Rather than simply log the quantity of books, perhaps embellishing with a short summary or bibliographical entry, I have them discuss quality.
The discussions are rich, organic, and run themselves. All I needed to do was have the patience to set it up right. So I’ve pulled together some steps that I’ve been working on for the past couple of years that help introduce students to the art of blogging without neglecting the science of building community and collaboration.
So I just finished introducing blogging to my middle school classes. They are hooked, as each year before them was hooked. I use it as a substitute for Reading Logs, that dreaded love-of-reading killer which causes eye rolls in many a Language Arts class. Rather than simply log the quantity of books, perhaps embellishing with a short summary or bibliographical entry, I have them discuss quality.
The discussions are rich, organic, and run themselves. All I needed to do was have the patience to set it up right. So I’ve pulled together some steps that I’ve been working on for the past couple of years that help introduce students to the art of blogging without neglecting the science of building community and collaboration.
Teaching Tolerance - Commemorate 9/11 by Confronting Islamophobia | Teaching Tolerance
Commemorate 9/11 by Confronting Islamophobia | Teaching Tolerance
Some good suggestions in this thorough post!
Huff Post - Dan Brown: Yes We Need Great Teachers! But Vague, Emotional Rhetoric Can Be Counterproductive
Dan Brown: Yes We Need Great Teachers! But Vague, Emotional Rhetoric Can Be Counterproductive: "I attended two early screenings this summer of Davis Guggenheim's big-ticket education documentary, Waiting for Superman, and it touches the education reform zeitgeist. When the film unspools across America over the next weeks, I predict a massive chorus of voices echoing his entreaties for more great teachers, less union influence, and school choice.
The movie masterfully pushes the audience's emotional buttons by following five vulnerable children and their vulnerable parents who are hoping and praying for admission by lottery to privately-run, publicly-funded charter schools. The families' limited options are undeniably unjust. The post-screening Q&A sessions I attended featured Michelle Rhee, Randi Weingarten, and Geoffrey Canada, and all of them opened their comments by saying they cried through the film's final scenes.
In the closing credits, the movie plays hopeful music, and floating text assembles itself on the screen to read: 'Great schools come from... you' and repeatedly encourages viewers to sign up for a text message feed.
The overarching message to movie-watchers is: CARE!!! CARE ABOUT SCHOOLS!!!
The movie masterfully pushes the audience's emotional buttons by following five vulnerable children and their vulnerable parents who are hoping and praying for admission by lottery to privately-run, publicly-funded charter schools. The families' limited options are undeniably unjust. The post-screening Q&A sessions I attended featured Michelle Rhee, Randi Weingarten, and Geoffrey Canada, and all of them opened their comments by saying they cried through the film's final scenes.
In the closing credits, the movie plays hopeful music, and floating text assembles itself on the screen to read: 'Great schools come from... you' and repeatedly encourages viewers to sign up for a text message feed.
The overarching message to movie-watchers is: CARE!!! CARE ABOUT SCHOOLS!!!
Huff Post - Alfie Kohn: What Passes for School Reform: "Value-Added" Teacher Evaluation and Other Absurdities
Alfie Kohn: What Passes for School Reform: "Value-Added" Teacher Evaluation and Other Absurdities: "The less people know about teaching and learning, the more sympathetic they're likely to be to the kind of 'school reform' that's all the rage these days. Look, they say, some teachers (and schools) are lousy, aren't they? And we want kids to receive a better education -- including poor kids, who typically get the short end of the stick, right? So let's rock the boat a little! Clean out the dead wood, close down the places that don't work, slap public ratings on these suckers just like restaurants that have to display the results of their health inspections.
On my sunnier days, I manage to look past the ugliness of the L.A. Times's unconscionable public shaming of teachers who haven't 'added value' to their students, the sheer stupidity and arrogance of Newsweek's cover story on the topic last spring, the fact that the editorials and columns about education in every major newspaper in the U.S. seem to have been written by the same person, all reflecting an uncritical acceptance of the Bush-Obama-Gates version of school reform.
I try to put it all down to mere ignorance and tamp down darker suspicions about what's going on. If I squeeze my eyes tightly, I can almost see how a reasonable person, someone who doesn't want to widen the real gap between the haves and have-nots (which is what tends to happen when attention is focused on the gap in test scores), might look at what's going on and think that it sounds like common sense.
Unfortunately, the people who know the most about the subject tend to work in the field of education, which means their protests can be dismissed. Educational theorists and researchers are just 'educationists' with axes to grind, hopelessly out of touch with real classrooms. And the people who spend their days in real classrooms, teaching our children -- well, they're just afraid of being held accountable, aren't they? (Actually, proponents of corporate-style school reform find it tricky to attack teachers, per se, so they train their fire instead on the unions that represent them.) Once the people who do the educating have been excluded from a conversation about how to fix education, we end up hearing mostly from politicians, corporate executives, and journalists.
This type of reform consists of several interlocking parts, powered by a determination to 'test kids until they beg for mercy,' as the late Ted Sizer once put it. Test scores are accepted on faith as a proxy for quality, which means we can evaluate teachers on the basis of how much value they've added -- 'value' meaning nothing more than higher scores. That, in turn, paves the way for manipulation by rewards and punishments: Dangle more money in front of the good teachers (with some kind of pay-for-performance scheme) and shame or fire the bad ones. Kids, too, can be paid for jumping through hoops. (It's not a coincidence that this incentive-driven model is favored by economists, who have a growing influence on educational matters and who still tend to accept a behaviorist paradigm that most of psychology left behind ages ago.)
'Reform' also means diverting scarce public funds to charter schools, many of them run by for-profit corporations. It means standardizing what's taught (and ultimately tested) from coast to coast, as if uniformity was synonymous with quality. It means reducing job security for teachers, even though tenure just provides due-process protections so people can't be sacked arbitrarily. It means attacking unions at every opportunity, thereby winning plaudits from the folks who, no matter what the question, mutter menacingly about how the damned unions are to blame.
On my sunnier days, I manage to look past the ugliness of the L.A. Times's unconscionable public shaming of teachers who haven't 'added value' to their students, the sheer stupidity and arrogance of Newsweek's cover story on the topic last spring, the fact that the editorials and columns about education in every major newspaper in the U.S. seem to have been written by the same person, all reflecting an uncritical acceptance of the Bush-Obama-Gates version of school reform.
I try to put it all down to mere ignorance and tamp down darker suspicions about what's going on. If I squeeze my eyes tightly, I can almost see how a reasonable person, someone who doesn't want to widen the real gap between the haves and have-nots (which is what tends to happen when attention is focused on the gap in test scores), might look at what's going on and think that it sounds like common sense.
Unfortunately, the people who know the most about the subject tend to work in the field of education, which means their protests can be dismissed. Educational theorists and researchers are just 'educationists' with axes to grind, hopelessly out of touch with real classrooms. And the people who spend their days in real classrooms, teaching our children -- well, they're just afraid of being held accountable, aren't they? (Actually, proponents of corporate-style school reform find it tricky to attack teachers, per se, so they train their fire instead on the unions that represent them.) Once the people who do the educating have been excluded from a conversation about how to fix education, we end up hearing mostly from politicians, corporate executives, and journalists.
This type of reform consists of several interlocking parts, powered by a determination to 'test kids until they beg for mercy,' as the late Ted Sizer once put it. Test scores are accepted on faith as a proxy for quality, which means we can evaluate teachers on the basis of how much value they've added -- 'value' meaning nothing more than higher scores. That, in turn, paves the way for manipulation by rewards and punishments: Dangle more money in front of the good teachers (with some kind of pay-for-performance scheme) and shame or fire the bad ones. Kids, too, can be paid for jumping through hoops. (It's not a coincidence that this incentive-driven model is favored by economists, who have a growing influence on educational matters and who still tend to accept a behaviorist paradigm that most of psychology left behind ages ago.)
'Reform' also means diverting scarce public funds to charter schools, many of them run by for-profit corporations. It means standardizing what's taught (and ultimately tested) from coast to coast, as if uniformity was synonymous with quality. It means reducing job security for teachers, even though tenure just provides due-process protections so people can't be sacked arbitrarily. It means attacking unions at every opportunity, thereby winning plaudits from the folks who, no matter what the question, mutter menacingly about how the damned unions are to blame.
Writing Workshop: A Primer
This post points toward resources that describe the essence of the writer's workshop as well as models for how it may play out over the course of a year or a unit.
Essential Books
**Nancie Atwell, In The Middle | Atwell basically invented the idea of the writing workshop and reading this book is the best way to understand the theory and workings behind it. She also provides a wealth of mini-lessons and strategies for making it work.
**Murray, A Writer Teaches Writing | Considered by many to be one of the original gurus of teaching writing, Murray provides an essential framework for thinking about how students actually learn to write.
Other Books / More Specific Books
**Heather Lattimer, Thinking Through Genre | Lattimer describes in detail several reading/writing workshop units of study that are extremely helpful for seeing how a unit plays out. Such units include editorial, feature article, and memoir.
**Bomer & Bomer, For A Better World | This one focuses on writing workshop with a bend toward social justice.
**Karen Caine, Writing to Persuade | We received this at our workshop this summer. Caine lays out a very clear and organized lesson / unit structure for writing workshop focused on persuasive writing. I think the lessons need some serious adaptation, but it provides a good blueprint.
**Janet Angelillo, Writing About Reading | This one focuses on units that engage students in writing significant responses to their independent reading.
Sample Units and Other Resources
This link takes you to a privately shared folder on Google Docs that has examples of past units created by our school when we worked with Teacher's College. Included also are outlines and chapters of helpful books.
Essential Books
**Nancie Atwell, In The Middle | Atwell basically invented the idea of the writing workshop and reading this book is the best way to understand the theory and workings behind it. She also provides a wealth of mini-lessons and strategies for making it work.
**Murray, A Writer Teaches Writing | Considered by many to be one of the original gurus of teaching writing, Murray provides an essential framework for thinking about how students actually learn to write.
Other Books / More Specific Books
**Heather Lattimer, Thinking Through Genre | Lattimer describes in detail several reading/writing workshop units of study that are extremely helpful for seeing how a unit plays out. Such units include editorial, feature article, and memoir.
**Bomer & Bomer, For A Better World | This one focuses on writing workshop with a bend toward social justice.
**Karen Caine, Writing to Persuade | We received this at our workshop this summer. Caine lays out a very clear and organized lesson / unit structure for writing workshop focused on persuasive writing. I think the lessons need some serious adaptation, but it provides a good blueprint.
**Janet Angelillo, Writing About Reading | This one focuses on units that engage students in writing significant responses to their independent reading.
Sample Units and Other Resources
This link takes you to a privately shared folder on Google Docs that has examples of past units created by our school when we worked with Teacher's College. Included also are outlines and chapters of helpful books.
Middleweb: Thinkfinity Plus
from Middleweb
MAJOR RESOURCE: THINKFINITY PLUS
http://bit.ly/mw-thinkfinity
Thinkfinity was launched three years ago by Verizon Foundation with
an impressive list of education partners. The foundation has invested
$30 million to create a premiere teaching resources site, complete
with a social networking component for those who are not only looking
for good lesson plans and other teaching resources, but like to talk
about their work. Inside the fancy shell, Thinkfinity houses a
database that includes thousands of resources in various subject
areas. If you prefer to skip to the chase, once you reach the
homepage, find the drop-down menu "In the Classroom" in the upper
left of your screen and click to choose from Lesson Plans, Student
Interactives, 21st Century Skills, Today in History, and more.
MAJOR RESOURCE: THINKFINITY PLUS
http://bit.ly/mw-thinkfinity
Thinkfinity was launched three years ago by Verizon Foundation with
an impressive list of education partners. The foundation has invested
$30 million to create a premiere teaching resources site, complete
with a social networking component for those who are not only looking
for good lesson plans and other teaching resources, but like to talk
about their work. Inside the fancy shell, Thinkfinity houses a
database that includes thousands of resources in various subject
areas. If you prefer to skip to the chase, once you reach the
homepage, find the drop-down menu "In the Classroom" in the upper
left of your screen and click to choose from Lesson Plans, Student
Interactives, 21st Century Skills, Today in History, and more.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
NYTimes Must-Read: On the Brain and Learning
Mind: Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits
Psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Middleweb: VisuWords
VisuWords: "
If you're familiar with Visual Thesaurus, you'll have some idea of how the VisuWords online graphical dictionary displays information about a word or phrase you enter into the database. VisuWords uses color-coded connections to indicate relationships such as "is a part of" or "opposes" and parts of speech, such as "nouns", "verbs", or "adverbs". Mouse over synonyms to see pop-up definitions and an example of the word in a sentence. The no-membership-required website uses Princeton's WordNet dictionary and provides simple tips on how to get the most out of the display."
If you're familiar with Visual Thesaurus, you'll have some idea of how the VisuWords online graphical dictionary displays information about a word or phrase you enter into the database. VisuWords uses color-coded connections to indicate relationships such as "is a part of" or "opposes" and parts of speech, such as "nouns", "verbs", or "adverbs". Mouse over synonyms to see pop-up definitions and an example of the word in a sentence. The no-membership-required website uses Princeton's WordNet dictionary and provides simple tips on how to get the most out of the display.
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