newteacher

New Teaching in a New Year

a group of thinkers was asked to speculate on what would new ideas would change the world....one thought about teaching.  interesting stuff....See other responses at The Edge

WEB-EMPOWERED REVOLUTION IN TEACHING

CHRIS ANDERSON Curator, TED Conference 

  Today when we think of the world's teeming billions of humans, we tend to think: overpopulation, poverty, disease, instability, environmental destruction. They are the cause of most of the planet's problems. What if that were to change? What if the average human were able to contribute more than consume? To add more than subtract? Think of the world as if each person drives a balance sheet. On the negative side are the resources they consume without replacing, on the positive side are the contributions they make to the planet in the form of the resources they produce, the lasting artifacts-of-value they build, and the ideas and technologies that might create a better future for their family, their community and for the planet as a whole. Our whole future hangs on whether the sum of those balance sheets can turn positive. What might make that possible? One key reason for hope is that so far we have barely scraped the surface of human potential. Throughout history, the vast majority of humans have not been the people they could have been. Take this simple thought experiment. Pick your favorite scientist, mathematician or cultural hero. Now imagine that instead of being born when and where they were, they had instead been born with the same in-built-but-unlocked abilities in a typical poverty-stricken village in, say, the France of 1200 or the Ethiopia of 1980. Would they have made the contribution they made? Of course not. They would never have received the education and encouragement it took to achieve what they did. Instead they would have simply lived out a life of poverty, with perhaps an occasional yearning that there must be a better way. Conversely, an unknown but vast number of those grinding out a living today have the potential to be world-changers... if only we could find a way of unlocking that potential. Two ingredients might be enough to do that. Knowledge and inspiration. If you learn of ideas that could transform your life, and you feel the inspiration necessary to act on that knowledge, there's a real chance your life will indeed be transformed. 

  There are many scary things about today's world. But one that is truly thrilling is that the means of spreading both knowledge and inspiration have never been greater. Five years ago, an amazing teacher or professor with the ability to truly catalyze the lives of his or her students could realistically hope to impact maybe 100 people each year. Today that same teacher can have their words spread on video to millions of eager students. There are already numerous examples of powerful talks that have spread virally to massive Internet audiences. Driving this unexpected phenomenon is the fact that the physical cost of distributing a recorded talk or lecture anywhere in the world via the internet has fallen effectively to zero. This has happened with breathtaking speed and its implications are not yet widely understood. But it is surely capable of transforming global education. For one thing, the realization that today's best teachers can become global celebrities is going to boost the caliber of those who teach. For the first time in many years it's possible to imagine ambitious, brilliant 18-year-olds putting 'teacher' at the top of their career choice list. Indeed the very definition of "great teacher" will expand, as numerous others outside the profession with the ability to communicate important ideas find a new incentive to make that talent available to the world. Additionally every existing teacher can greatly amplify their own abilities by inviting into their classroom, on video, the world's greatest scientists, visionaries and tutors. (Can a teacher inspire over video? Absolutely. We hear jaw-dropping stories of this every day.) Now think about this from the pupils' perspective. In the past, everyone's success has depended on whether they were lucky enough to have a great mentor or teacher in their neighborhood. The vast majority have not been fortunate. But a young girl born in Africa today will probably have access in 10 years' time to a cell phone with a high-resolution screen, a web connection, and more power than the computer you own today. We can imagine her obtaining face-to-face insight and encouragement from her choice of the world's great teachers. She will get a chance to be what she can be. And she might just end up being the person who saves the planet for our grandchildren.

On rethinking teaching

A former student sent this along for us to think about. The suggestion is that we're thinking about this work in fundamentally wrong ways. How very John Dewey, yes? She could be on to something.....thoughts?

Rethink ways to teach

By EILEEN LANDAY, The Providence Journal
Thursday, December 6, 2007

As a society, we've raised the bar on what it means to comprehend a text. At the same time, we've increased the percentage of students we expect to master these processes well beyond the 50 percent who graduated from high school half a century ago. Recognizing that many students don't achieve the standards now being set, we have labeled them "struggling readers." That label seems incorrect and inadvertently ironic, and it signals the murkiness of our own understanding.

Mamacitas- a video from El Puente

Again, playing with new technologies here. Below is a video aimed at latina secondary school students regarding teen pregnancy from the El Puente Project. The focus here it seem is in the power of stories to impact people--real stories from real folks. There's alot of ways a converstion sparked by this video could go. I'm increasingly interested in what folks think of these new media efforts at reaching young people. Heck, there was recently a presidential debate via YouTube. Any thoughts?

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Mindfulness & Classroom Practice

In the Classroom, a New Focus on Quieting the Mind- Theodore Rigby for The New York Times

The lesson began with the striking of a Tibetan singing bowl to induce mindful awareness. ...

With the sound of their new school bell, the fifth graders at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School here closed their eyes and focused on their breathing, as they tried to imagine “loving kindness” on the playground.

“I was losing at baseball and I was about to throw a bat,” Alex Menton, 11, reported to his classmates the next day. “The mindfulness really helped.”

As summer looms, students at dozens of schools across the country are trying hard to be in the present moment. This is what is known as mindfulness training, in which stress-reducing techniques drawn from Buddhist meditation are wedged between reading and spelling tests.

Students & Intelligence

A study reviewed on NPR, Students' View of Intelligence Can Help Grades by Michelle Trudeau, finds that students' view of intelligence enables higher achievement in math scores.   Talk about metacognition!  The implications here are profound in that working with children around issues of the process of learning itself allows them to see how they have some control over their learning lives--they work harder, they develop a sense of ownership in their learning, the see possibility.  In SOE's, we often get a lot of flack about our constructivist approach but, as I like to say, constructivism has moved out of the philosophical and into the biological as we learn how the brain works.  Of course, this study prompts me to think about how that process works the other way as well....back to the psychology.

This also make me think of some to the hubbub around the recent visit of Ruby Payne to our area.  Her ubiqituous (for reasons I may go into elsewhere) work defines a "culture of poverty" (nice to see you again Senator Monyihan) that educators should "understand."  I see this work as precisely oppossed to what we learn from this study from Stanford University.  Instead of labelling and stereotyping, we need to be encourage kids to think about thinking.  But of course, and I think this is why some of our preservice students are so resistent to social constructivist learning theory, it is a lot harder....and it implicates us, as teachers, in the project of student learning.

Charters: Rant 1 (I'm assuming there'll be more...)

  An opinion piece in the Indy Star on charter schools suggests that "IPS must not recoil from charter competition" and suggests that, "Charter schools are enriching Indianapolis and Indiana."  The problem of course is that the author [Keven Teasley of Greater Educational Opportunities Foundation] uses their existence to somehow prove their worth.  We can't deny the fact that they exist, and that they have waiting lists, but this is far from proving that they're good for the children of Indiana.  In fact, as recent research from the Bush administration proves, they actually do WORSE than public schools in teaching children coming from high-poverty environments [see an earlier post Ignoring Research...]. 

Perhaps more troubling is a statement from the ol' GEO itself that cites their core belief in and support of "all quality means of educating children including public, private, charter, religious, and home (see above website)."  Do you know what that means kids?  Vouchers.   Yes, tax vouchers for religious schools (of the kind that I myself graduated from), private schools, home schools.   I advise you take a look at the Republican 2007 Education Agenda in Indiana which has this very component as part of the platform.

Ignoring Research on Schools

Oh, boy is this a good one!  Not sure if folks followed the recent scandal out of the Dept of Education [see another blog's review] recently but it points to something big.  Continually, the folks making education policy don't seem to know anything about education [see recent editorial in the Indy Star], or, as it often appears, they don't seem to care about what we do know.  Now what could be going on here??

Kudos to Dr. Kennedy for getting the good word out there. Me?  I'm just talking to the ether...

sheila suess kennedy

Ignoring education evidence

Americans are absolutely smitten with detective shows where justice triumphs after a painstaking collection and analysis of all available evidence. The popularity of these shows reflects--accurately, I think, America's pragmatic culture, our desire to "get to the bottom of things" and to base decisions on hard evidence.

So how do we explain an American policy process that increasingly displays a positive contempt for evidence?

August 7, 2006

Technology & Classroom Management

A new post here hoping from some help from our readers.  One of my students has a situation where her middle school students are supposed to be using a computer-based math curriculum but instead find games online to play (read her email below).  She's looking for some classroom management advice on how to handle this situation.  Any takers??

Of course, you know my mantra that "a good lesson plan is the best classroom management" but if the curriculum is via computer......???  I think this raises some interesting questions.  Whatcha think?

Dropouts in Time

More news about dropouts (some use the term pushouts because schools don't want them taking the high stakes test--see Texas) and efforts to work on the issue right here in Indiana.  Be careful though kids, you know my rant about crisis language in education--it usually serves a political purpose.  Remember that dropout rates have been pretty steadily declining since 1972 (research).  But, this is not to say that its about time that we paid attention and when's the last time you read Time anyway?  Whatcha think about this law?

from the IndyStar...

Dropout Indiana Posted by Beth Murphy April 14, 2006

“Dropout Nation” sounds pretty ominous, and it is. That’s the headline of Time magazine’s special report cover story this week. Dateline: Shelbyville, Indiana....

Citizenship Education-1.1

Important commentary on the unintended effects of the "era of accountability," the diminishing of civic learning in our schools.  Most Americans believe preparation for effective citizenship is a crucial part of public schooling but, in practice, its being cut short.

Not By Math Alone by Sandra Day O'Connor and Roy Romer

Fierce global competition prompted President Bush to use the State of the Union address to call for better math and science education, where there's evidence that many schools are falling short.We should be equally troubled by another shortcoming in American schools: Most young people today simply do not have an adequate understanding of how our government and political system work, and they are thus not well prepared to participate as citizens.....

To view the entire article, go to

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/24/AR2006032401621.html?referrer=emailarticle