While at the NEA convention today, I flagged down a few delegates from a sampling of states and asked the following: What should be NEA's main priority right now? The major theme at the convention so far has been the union's push to re-elect President Barack Obama. Do you agree this is where the organization's focus should be? Here's a smattering of the answers I heard: Re-electing the president should be "the immediate one, but there are lots of other related and unrelated ones. Standing up for ourselves, improving our brand and marketing for teachers. [Negative branding] kills morale and ...

Ariel Sacks recalls an interesting exchange from the day she went down to the district office to submit her materials for her very first teaching job: The middle-aged woman who processed my paperwork was friendly in that way only New Yorkers can be, and chatted me up a bit. When she gave me the thick envelope with the certificate and other information in it, she told me, "I can see you're a bright one. It won't be long before I see you you back up here with a district job." Eight years later (and still a teacher), Sacks ponders the ...

A Chicago Tribune piece tells the story of one teacher's battle with post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from abuse she endured from a group of students at a Chicago public school.

Campaign rally or Representative Assembly? At some points yesterday it was hard to tell. The 8,000 or so delegates of the nation's largest teachers' union gathered in Washington for their annual convention heard one message above all others: Vote for Obama in November. Just outside the assembly hall, attendees traded off Sharpees to write notes to the president on a massive banner entitled "NEA Educators for Obama." A portrait of Obama and NEA President Dennis Van Roekel hung above the hall entrance. The RA began in its usual raucous fashion, with blaring pop music (Shania Twain's "I Feel Like ...

Hunter Gehlbach, an assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, says that, to truly improve teacher-evaluation systems, schools should take a lesson from professional sports teams. In evaluating player performance, he explains, NBA, NFL, and MLB coaches and personnel managers today go well beyond high-profile "traditional statistics" like total points scored or batting averages and take into account a host of contextual metrics that measure more subtle contributions to team success. (To take one example: In basketball, teams use a "plus-minus" metric to look at the scoring differential when a particular player is in the game.) ...

Teachers, you may want to be sitting down for this one. The 2012 Texas Republican Party Platform, adopted June 9 at the state convention in Forth Worth, seems to take a stand against, well, the teaching of critical thinking skills. Read it for yourself: We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority. As a top commenter on a Reddit thread ...

To boost teacher retention and student achievement at high-poverty schools, states and districts must first look to improve working conditions for teachers, concludes a new report by The Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit group. The report profiles five school districts that have focused efforts on bettering teacher support and development—specifically by strengthening leadership and encouraging professional collaboration—and have shown promising or positive gains as a result. The report follows on the heels of the recent annual MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, which found that teacher satisfaction has dipped to its lowest point since 1989. That annual survey...

In a Huffington Post column, Boston teacher Lillie Marshall says that taking a year-long leave of absence after her fifth year in teaching gave her the "renewed vigor and resources" she needed to continue in the profession and, not coincidentally, made her a much better educator. She extrapolates: Often, what teachers need in order to stay in the classroom is permission to step out of it for a time. It gives us perspective, balance, and new skills. Whether teachers do this by taking on hybrid roles, or by a whole year's leave of absence, we educators must cultivate ourselves as ...

Dominick Recckio, an accomplished high school student who blogs for Edutopia, surveyed students at his school on their homework habits and then wrote up some tips for both teachers and students on easing the nightly process. Within the post, he offers this reminder that students are often appreciative and receptive when teachers put work in a real-world context: What could be a better way of answering students' biggest question—"When am I ever going to use this?"—than by showing them? There are many ways this could be done. Teachers could assign students the task of finding their own applications...

By guest blogger Colette Marie Bennett, author of "To Pass or Not to Pass? The End-of-Year Moral Dilemma" Two weeks ago, I composed a First Person piece that questioned whether I should pass or fail a student in my English II class who could meet many of the benchmarks but had failed to complete the assignments. I could not justify a passing grade. The post was published in Education Week Teacher and received a spectrum of replies that ranged from the hardline stance of "flunk her" to a more forgiving "grades are meaningless so pass her" position. Some responses questioned ...

Grockit, the online test prep company, has recently launched a new social learning site similar to Pinterest, but designed specifically for educators and students, according to T.H.E. Journal, an education-technology news magazine. On Learnist, users can "pin" YouTube videos, audio clips, and other content they find on the Web to digital bulletin boards, which Grockit calls "learn boards." The boards can be organized by theme or lesson and shared on other social media sites. Users can comment on individual posts, and educators can reorder materials on their boards. A recent article on Mashable said Grockit founder Farbood Nivi ...

On Powerful Learning Practice's "Voices" blog, high school English teacher Shelley Wright says that teachers and students need to understand that blogging is very different in kind from persuasive-essay writing. It's more informal, looser in structural demands, and more playful. And in the long run, Wright argues, it's likely a more useful skill: I think writing and persuasive thinking skills are important. However, I question the current products we require of students as proof of their learning. Most of the essays written by our students likely end up in the garbage or the computer trash can. And most are for ...

In the Highlands County School District in Sebring, Fla., science teachers are voicing their opposition to the district's decision to eliminate hands-on-dissections in schools for next year, according to Highlands Today.

Something for you English teachers out there: Wall Street Journal columnist Sue Shellenbarger has an interesting piece on the downfall of decent grammar in the work place—a consequence, observers say, of the prevalence of informal communication conventions today.

A commentary piece on CNN.com hones in on Josh Hoekstra, a U.S. history teacher in Minneapolis who has found a way to captivate his students' attention: His teaching curriculum, called Teach With Tournaments, is modeled after college basketball's March Madness tournament.

Teach for America announced today that, as of this fall, the group will have more than 10,000 first- and second-year corps members working in schools—the largest corps yet and a 10 percent increase over last year's total. The organization has also become the top employer for graduating seniors at 55 universities, according to the press release, including the University of California-Berkeley, Howard University, Yale University, and Arizona State University. (The word choice there is a bit peculiar, however, since TFA itself does not technically employ or pay the corps members—the districts they work for do.) Other interesting...

In response to our recent First Person article lauding the merits of flipped classrooms, Arthur McKee, a managing director at the National Council on Teacher Quality, offers some cynicism, writing that the model is unproven but likely to proliferate "given all the attention (and money) it's getting." In order for teachers to be effective in the flipped setting, he writes, several things have to happen: • Districts have to become more choosey about their online materials than they have been about textbooks. "Good teachers can make up for the shortcomings of bad printed curricular materials through their lectures," he writes. "But ...

The University of Houston has brought attention to a study that found there is no significant relationship between the academic achievement of African-American students and the percentage of African-American teachers in a particular school.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has put $1.4 million into the development of an "engagement pedometer," a bracelet intended to measure students' emotional responses to instruction, according to Reuters. The devices, which have been tested to gauge consumers' reactions to advertising, could tell teachers in real-time "which kids are tuned in and which are zoned out." They could also help educators decide what style of instruction—online learning, games, lecture, etc.—best holds students' interest. The bracelets work by sending a small electric current across the student's skin and measuring "subtle changes in electrical charges as the sympathetic...

Miss Eyre at NYC Educator offers some concise year-end reflections on looping with a class to the next grade level, which she did for the first time between 2010-11 and 2011-12. Among the pros, she says the stability of having the same teacher is good for "your fragile, awkward kids who tend to withdraw. ... [I]t allows some of them to open up and form relationships, with the teacher and the classmates, that might be hard for them otherwise." Looping also "really does allow you to get more done," she writes, because you begin the year with established routines. There ...