Blogboard

Renee Moore of TeachMoore voices skepticism about statistical attempts, often key to performance-pay plans, to measure the "value added" by a particular teacher to a student's achievement level:

This concept denies the cumulative aspect of education. It ignores the truth that multiple factors impact the learning and retention of that learning among students. ...

Moreover, students develop and mature as learners over time. A student may have been introduced to a concept or skill in 6th grade, had it reinforced in different ways by different teachers over several years, then in 10th or 11th grade that concept [seemingly] suddenly took root and the student actually assumed ownership of the knowledge as evidenced by a deeper understanding and ability to apply the concept. Such "seeding" and "harvesting" occurs repeatedly over the course of any student's educational career. Which individual teacher would get the "credit" for these accomplishments?

Posted by Anthony Rebora, teachermagazine.org at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ms. Frizzle, a New York science teacher currently on a fellowship in Turkey (and blogging under the name Ögretmen), responds to a New York Times article on the difficulty of working with middle school children. She believes there are compensations:

As someone who chose to teach middle school and has stayed committed to the age group for seven years, I’d be the first to admit that every day can feel like a series of soap operas whirling around me. Teaching middle school has quadrupled my patience—and I am still not patient enough some days—but it has also brought great rewards. Old enough to have really developed individual interests, nevertheless middle school kids have not yet narrowed their path and are still open to falling in love with something unexpected (ecology? poetry?). They have a fierce sense of justice. They don’t need their shoes tied and they rarely wet their pants in class, but they still need their teachers for so many things, and when we provide emotional support, they return it fifty-fold.

Clearly, she's found a happy medium.

Posted by Anthony Rebora, teachermagazine.org at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Blogger Mei Flower was pretty sure her 9th grade students couldn't follow directions, and with standardized tests looming, such a skill gap could spell disaster. So she designed some worksheets to test them:

Circle the noun in each sentence that begins with a vowel.

This is where it would become very important for them to read the directions, you see. And the last sentence was always this:

Then, go on to the next section.

Well, except the last section, in which I wrote this:

Turn your paper over and draw a picture of a dog. Raise your hand when you are finished.

Her results?

My first period class is not very good at reading directions. Half of them did not catch the thing about vowels, and fully three-quarters of them didn't even catch the difference between circle and underline. Almost all of them drew the dog, though. I thought that was weird.

If dog-drawing is on the state standardized exam, her students will be all set.

Posted by at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Attention English teachers: Mister Teacher, Lady Strathconn, and others have been passing around a list of (mostly) classic books to test how well-read they are. How about you?

Posted by Anthony Rebora, teachermagazine.org at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Andy Carvin of learning.now disputes the notion that Internet social-networking tools are to blame for the growing level of narcissism among young people. On the contrary, he argues, sites such as MySpace and YouTube are more about community than self-centeredness:

Sure, some people are there for vanity or proto-celebrity purposes, but most people are there for us, not me. They’re communities where people come together to find each other and bond over likeminded interests. They’re communities where people reinforce interpersonal relationships through sharing and creating content.

As with most new technologies, that is, it’s all in how you use them.

Posted by Anthony Rebora, teachermagazine.org at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Epiphany in Baltimore is frustrated that parents are not just a phone call away. Limited resources left the inner city teacher struggling to find a way to connect with students' parents:

At school this year, parental contact is nearly impossible. I have no phone in my room. ... To call parents at home, we must use the English department phone. However, the line out was inadvertently cut a few weeks ago by custodial services, and now there is no way to call out from that office. Therefore, I had to go to the main office, and speak in the very public area there while I had a 25-minute, intermittently angry phone call with a parent.

He can't use his cell phone because of poor service and dropped calls in the school building. The lack of a phone line poses security issues as well; he had to run to tell administrators about a fight that broke out in the hallways.

Epiphany suggests this solution:

When the new contract this year is negotiated, I wish this would be written in -- that the school should provide a convenient line out for teachers to administer parent contact. It's just not fair to expect parental contact and then not give teachers the access to do it.

Posted by Amanda Jones at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Tim of Assorted Stuff examines whether the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project will benefit developing countries, and what U.S. schools could learn from it. He comments on the following excerpt from eLearn magazine's article, Can the "$100 Laptop" Change the World?:

Some of the problems [Ethan Zuckerman] sees in the schoolrooms in the developing world are echoed here in our own halls of learning. "Educational systems that teach to standardized national tests mean that the emphasis is on making sure a percentage of students learn enough information to pass the national exams, and less on learning through self-guided exploration, which is what the OLPC project is designed to enable."

Tim thinks this is why technology has not been an effective learning tool in American classrooms:

In recent years we've spent tens of millions of dollars in this country on hardware, software, and connectivity, yet in most classrooms computers are still primarily used as expensive reinforcements for standard instructional processes.

Tim says a new educational system is needed in order to make technology in schools effective, both in the U.S. and in developing countries. Do you agree? How can the educational system improve technology use in classrooms?

Posted by Amanda Jones at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

More on the subject of kids who don't get support from the adults at home: NYC Educator is surprised to find himself in agreement with conservative commentator David Brooks, who argues that a really good presidential candidate would take the approach that schools don't just need more money—they need programs to make sure kids are prepared to learn before they get to school. NYC Educator's thoughts:

The bold candidate will admit that kids who don't learn social skills at home don't carry them to school. Kids with caring parents become better students.

David Brooks suggests a program where trained nurses or older women pay scheduled visits to young mothers at home to teach them how to care for their kids and optimize their early childhood development. NYC Educator likes the idea:

It makes perfect sense to me. What do you think? Will we leave fewer kids behind if we help their moms early on?

Posted by at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)