Group items tagged

One of the best examples I have seen of the flex model was in Morgan Hill, California. This is a district south of San Jose where about a third of its students are Hispanic and I believe over a third of its students are on free-and-reduced price lunch. The school is called the Silicon Valley Flex Academy - Grades 6 through 12. As you walk into the school there are a couple of huge open spaces on either side where every student has his/her own office. In this space, each student has his/her own computer. The students are encouraged to decorate their own space with things they like (in the same way an adult might decorate an office at work). There are break out classrooms around the perimeter of the building. Here teachers are getting the data on how the kids are doing. Teachers can pull students into these break-out classrooms in very small groups. The teacher is then able to focus on a student's individual issues. The teacher's job is totally different in this arrangement. The fascinating thing was how much ownership the students have over their learning. They all knew exactly what was expected of them the entire year. They knew exactly how they were doing at any point. Their job was to learn the material. If they could get the work done during the school day there was no homework. So it was up to the individual students to make those decisions.

The teachers I spoke to explained that they had been trained to do lesson planning, lectures to large groups of students and classroom management -- none of which they were now doing. They explained that the adjustment was difficult. Training has not been built into the formal teacher training system for programs like this, and few are really thinking about it at the moment. Now, the teacher is still doing teaching or tutoring when pulling students out into small groups for project-based work, but instead of this being determined by a pacing guide, this is now being determined by where the students are in their learning. What was so interesting was that in this model, teachers were able to do the tutoring and value enrichment work that teachers really like to do but don't always get time to do in a classroom. One of the challenges the teachers mentioned was staying on top of scheduling. How do you keep track when you have students at different places in the curriculum? Those were tough decisions for teachers to make and they were, as you say, learning on the job.

When students own their learning, they feel responsible for it and motivated to do it. What they also appreciated was that the teacher was no longer there to "punish them" or "grade them down". Instead the teacher was there to help them reach their goal. This is much more of an environment built around success and motivation versus failure.

the goals of completion do not make the assumption that our (and their) work is finished when the students receive these initial degrees and certificates

be able to make informed decisions and use clear judgmen

Any writer knows the value of good research and with Diigo the process just got easier. Here’s a couple of ideas: tag items based on chapter, subject tag items for a bibliography jot a few notes to give context or your thoughts at the time highlight the section you intend to use and save the time of reviewing the entire page Diigo becomes even more essential in a collaboration project. The Forrester team used Delicious during their research for the book  Groundswell and I bet they could have used Diigo features like highlighting, comments, groups, and conversations.

tag recipes as appetizers, entrees, or desserts tag as vegetarian, diet, gluten free, or my favorite “enough-calories-to-make-Paula-Deen-blush” disclosure: the above link leads to my wife food blog MakeLifeDelicious.com, it’s the greatest food blog on earth #unbiased tag by ingredients highlight cooking times and pics

I love Diigo too. My son (10 years old) is working on his IB Exhibition on Water Pollution. He is working as part of a team. I helped them create a group for their topic so that they and their teacher can add resources, highlight text and tag interesting facts about the subject from home. Also, I am in a master's in education media design and am using Diigo to organize my resources for my Action Research project. Diigo is a great tool. Thanks for posting.

Harvard has invested heavily in a system of residential housing and high-quality tutoring.  This means that even students who pay the tuition sticker price aren’t covering the full cost of their education.  Thus, growing the size of its “customer” base, which is how businesses achieve scale economies and greater profitability, is financially problematic for Harvard and for other universities with similar operating models. 

What is the purpose of a university as depicted in this book? Is it: A. A university is an institution that provides a degree, which is a credential or screening device for the economy and for society? Or B.  A university is an institution in which people acquire the knowledge they need for a particular job? Or C.  A university is an institution in which people acquire the knowledge they need to be a citizen? Or D.  A university is an experience where you acquire a capacity to be a lifelong learner (because most of the knowledge you acquire will be obsolete within a few years and the jobs of tomorrow will not be the jobs of today)? Or E. Something else?

One of the best ways to learn to learn is to be an active learner and a teacher of one’s fellow students in college. This instructional philosophy isn’t yet widespread, but its effectiveness has been proven, and it doesn’t require additional financial investment, only a change in the attitudes of faculty members and students.  Broader adoption seems likely, with time.

the Obama administration's educational policy under the leadership of Arne Duncan lacks a democratic vision and sense of moral direction

Almost all of Duncan's polices are indebted to the codes of a market-driven business culture, legitimated through discourses of measurement, efficiency and utility. This is a discourse that values hedge fund managers over teachers, privatization over the public good, management over leadership and training over education. Duncan's fervent support of neoliberal values are well-known and are evident in his support for high-stakes testing, charter schools, school-business alliances, merit pay, linking teacher pay to higher test scores, offering students monetary rewards for higher grades, CEO-type management, abolishing tenure, defining the purpose of schooling as largely job training, the weakening of teacher unions and blaming teachers exclusively for the failure of public schooling.[4]

Duncan has expanded the reach of his educational reform policies and is now attempting to rewrite curricular mandates. Emphasizing the practical and experiential, he seeks to gut the critical nature of theory, pedagogy and knowledge taught in colleges of education. This is an important issue to more than just teachers who are denied a voice in curricular development; it also affects whole generations of youth. Such a bold initiative reveals in very clear terms the political project that drives his reforms and what he fears about both public schooling and the teachers who labor in classrooms every day.