New Teaching in a New Year
CHRIS ANDERSON Curator, TED Conference
CHRIS ANDERSON Curator, TED Conference
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? 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.Rethink ways to teach
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?
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.
A study reviewed on NPR, Students' View of Intelligence Can Help Grades by
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.
Continue reading "Charters: Rant 1 (I'm assuming there'll be more...)" »
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??
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?
“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....
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
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