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"Please, No More Professional Development! By Peter DeWitt on April 17, 2015 8:10 AM Today's guest blog is written by Kristine Fox (Ed.D), Senior Field Specialist/Research Associate at Quaglia Institute for Student Aspirations (QISA). She is a former teacher and administrator who has passion for teacher learning and student voice. Kris works directly with teachers and leaders across the country to help all learners reach their fullest potential. Peter DeWitt recently outlined why "faculty meetings are a waste of time." Furthering on his idea, most professional development opportunities don't offer optimal learning experiences and the rare teacher is sitting in her classroom thinking "I can't wait until my district's next PD day." When I inform a fellow educator that I am a PD provider, I can read her thoughts - boring, painful, waste of time, useless, irrelevant - one would think my job is equal to going to the dentist (sorry to my dentist friends). According to the Quaglia Institute and Teacher Voice and Aspirations International Center's National Teacher Voice Report only 54% percent of teachers agree "Meaningful staff development exists in my school." I can't imagine any other profession being satisfied with that number when it comes to employee learning and growth. What sense does it make for the science teacher to spend a day learning about upcoming English assessments? Or, for the veteran teacher to learn for the hundredth time how to use conceptual conflict as a hook. Why does education insist everyone attend the same type of training regardless of specialization, experience, or need? As a nod to the upcoming political campaigns and the inevitable introduction of plans with lots of points, here is my 5 Point Plan for revamping professional development. 5 Point Plan Point I - Change the Term: Semantics Matter We cannot reclaim the term Professional Development for teachers. It has a long, baggage-laden history of conformity that does not

"Parent Involvement or Parent Engagement?"

"This is an update of some of the posts I've written in the past about getting parents involved in blogging."

"A few years ago I blogged about the concept of Video Tagging and how I was using it to improve performance in my PE Classes. Back then the process was much more involved and required a tremendous level of setup and expensive dedicated hardware and software. This ultimately led to minimal take up within the PE community regardless of the massive benefits to learning. Flash forward to 2013 and we are now in a position easily tag video with a couple of mobile apps, which have a combined price of $8.48. Not only is this price a mere fraction of the cost involved in the 2011 example, it is without a doubt a much more accesible option for the masses. Check them out below;"

"You know that teaching involves more than the dispensing of facts. It is more important than ever that teachers help students learn HOW to learn. Skills that prepare students for 21st century careers involve more than memorization; critical thinking, collaboration and problem solving are key. The way to help students gain those skills is by creating lessons that let students learn actively in the classroom."

"I still focus on fluency with multiplication facts in fourth grade but fluency has a completely different meaning to me now. The way I work on fluency now does not involve timed tests. It does not involve kids being anxious or feeling unsuccessful at math. Instead I focus on developing number sense which helps kids learn and remember strategies that make them fluent with their multiplication facts. To the untrained eye, it often appears as if my fourth graders have memorized their facts when they actually know their facts from memory. "

"With the rise of new trends such as a flipped classroom and whole brain teaching, there is an emphasis on getting students more actively involved in learning in the classroom. And whether or not you choose to fully embrace either of these methods, we can all agree that we want students participating as much as possible. When students are actively participating, they are learning. In math classes we typically involve students in the problem-solving side, but we don't often expect them to provide explanations."

"Are you looking for ways to integration technology in your lesson plans and courses that provide for an engaging experience for you and your students? Fans of instructional technology know that it can be fun and inviting, and engaged students are far more likely to be learning. I believe that if you can get students involved and motivated effectively enough, you can improve their learning habits over the long term. With that in mind, here are 10 highly engaging uses of technology in the classroom, along with dozens of tools and resources for implementation. Most of these involve free web based tools, so that's an added bonus!"

"Recently many of our Year Six students have been involved in projects that require them to utilise the brain of a maker. Facing challenges involving the exploration of how everyday objects are manufactured and while responding to their 'Genius Hour' ambitions they are facing a new set of problems and discovering the joy that comes from solving these with their hands as much as their brains."

"As a parent and educator, I know it is super important that my kids learn how to make smart financial decisions now, before they go off into the real world.  But I know that raising money confident kids isn't always easy. It involves planning. It involves understanding ourselves how to be money confident-and that can be scary, even as adults. So when I was asked by the good people at T. Rowe Price to take a look at the Money Confident Kids® resources they have for school and home, you bet I was ready. The more I learn, the more I can help my children become financially fit. I really love the range and creativity of these resources, and you will, too."

"Helping children visualize math is critical to their success in the subject. I recently observed a 5th grade class starting a lesson on area and perimeter. I turned to a girl who was in my class four years earlier and reminded her that she knew the topic. "Yes I do!" she said excitedly. "The perimeter is where you sit along the outside of the rug in morning meeting, and area is the inside of the rug, where the squares are. That's from 1st grade," she said confidently, circling her fingers in the air to represent her thinking. Visual cues, like this one I use with my six- and seven-year-old students, stick and show that envisioning math helps children learn in lasting ways. We teachers can do more to give students internal ways to see the structure of mathematics-to understand types of units and what it means to move between them, and to pull apart and combine numbers. But math instruction is changing. At my school, in the early grades, we encourage children to use their fingers, something that feels so natural to them, to better understand numbers and the numbering system. We might talk about how a "high five" involves using a whole hand, which is really a unit made up of five fingers; while a thumbs-up involves just one segment of that five-part unit. We then go on to using things like beads on a string and, later, place-value disks, which are like poker chips, to help children see and work with numbers, units, and place value."

Pedagogy and curriculum that engages students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds and is deemed personally relevant to the lives they live, are seen as important factors towards equality of outcome by Wrench, Hammond, McCallum and Price (2012). Their research involved designing a curriculum and pedagogy that would be highly engaging to students of low-socioeconomic status. 'The interventions involved curriculum redesigns that set meaningful, challenging learning task(s) (culminating in high quality learning products); strong connection to student life-worlds; and a performative expectation for student learning.' (Wrench et al 2012 p934)

"f you're an entrepreneur and have young children, it's very easy to feel as if you're involved in a constant war between giving enough time and energy to your business and spending sufficient time with your family. There doesn't have to be so much friction between work and personal life, though. In fact, your children can benefit tremendously if you get them involved in your business pursuits."

"Regardless of whether you think every infant needs an iPad, I think we can all agree that technology has changed education for the better. Today's learners now enjoy easier, more efficient access to information; opportunities for extended and mobile learning; the ability to give and receive immediate feedback; and greater motivation to learn and engage. We now have programs and platforms that can transform learners into globally active citizens, opening up countless avenues for communication and impact. Thousands of educational apps have been designed to enhance interest and participation. Course management systems and learning analytics have streamlined the education process and allowed for quality online delivery. But if we had to pick the top ten, most influential ways technology has transformed education, what would the list look like? The following things have been identified by educational researchers and teachers alike as the most powerful uses of technology for learning. Take a look. 1. Critical Thinking In Meaningful Learning With Technology, David H. Jonassen and his co-authors argue that students do not learn from teachers or from technologies. Rather, students learn from thinking-thinking about what they are doing or what they did, thinking about what they believe, thinking about what others have done and believe, thinking about the thinking processes they use-just thinking and reasoning. Thinking mediates learning. Learning results from thinking. So what kinds of thinking are fostered when learning with technologies? Analogical If you distill cognitive psychology into a single principle, it would be to use analogies to convey and understand new ideas. That is, understanding a new idea is best accomplished by comparing and contrasting it to an idea that is already understood. In an analogy, the properties or attributes of one idea (the analogue) are mapped or transferred to another (the source or target). Single analogies are also known as sy

From the site: "I am hoping to connect our school with some other schools in a project where early elementary students share about their family and/or cultural traditions during the December holidays. This project is designed so that it does not require a lot of classroom time to complete and does not involve very complicated technology skills. It also will introduce teachers to Smilebox - which is a neat free tool for sharing images on the web and easily allows students and parents to leave comments."

Within this page,the complex processes involved in reading comprehension are divided into three categories (much like the National Reading Panel Report). The categories include vocabulary instruction, text comprehension instruction, and teacher preparation and comprehension strategies instruction. You'll also find useful websites that students can visit to practice their use of comprehension strategies with fiction and non-fiction texts at a variety of reading levels.

We have compiled a list of quantitative questions that involves algebra , Percentage, Area, Problems on Ages, Time and Work, Probability, Modern Algebra methods. Try solving them in 7 minutes as it will improve your confidence and will help in solving the exam that is to be held on 16th October to 11th November 2013. http://admissiontimes.com/cat-math/

We have compiled a list of quantitative questions that involves algebra , Percentage, Area, Problems on Ages, Time and Work, Probability, Modern Algebra methods. Try solving them in 7 minutes as it will improve your confidence and will help in solving the exam that is to be held on 16th October to 11th November 2013. http://admissiontimes.com/cat-math/