In 2009, TNTP reported that teacher evaluation systems didn’t accurately distinguish among teachers with varying levels of proficiency, failed to identify most of the teachers with serious performance problems, and were unhelpful in guiding professional development.
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The Widget Effect study concluded that “school districts must begin to distinguish great from good, good from fair, and fair from poor.”
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On average, only 2.7 percent of teachers were rated below Proficient/Exemplary on a 4- or 5-point scale.
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The percent of teachers given the top rating ranged from 73 percent in Tennessee to 8 percent in Massachusetts and 3 percent in Georgia.
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Many districts are drawing important distinctions between good and excellent teaching, but there is less differentiation among good, fair, and poor performance.
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Why do so few teachers receive below-proficient ratings, despite the fact that school administrators estimate that more than a quarter of their teachers aren’t up to par?
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Being merciful – Some principals said they were hesitant to give low ratings to rookie teachers out of kindness and a desire not to discourage (or lose) a teacher who had potential for growth.
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Principals knew that teachers could lose their jobs as a result of a low rating, and were upset when teachers cried.
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2013 Gates-funded Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study, which asserted that it’s possible to accurately evaluate teachers by triangulating data from student surveys, value-added scores, and classroom observations.
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Google, General Electric, and other corporations shifted from rating and ranking employees to providing real-time supervisor and peer feedback and coaching aimed at fostering professional growth to meet stretch goals. This rethinking was inspired by three findings from educational research: - Performance ratings tend to foster a “fixed” versus a “growth” mindset. - Numerical grades or ratings lead recipients to ignore detailed feedback. - Extrinsic rewards can discourage the behaviors they aim to improve.
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A 2012 initiative in Cincinnati suggests a different approach. Mid-career teachers who were observed four times by peers and given detailed feedback showed marked improvements in performance and student results. The key elements were frequency, credible observers, formative feedback, and a simple, low-stakes process with no direct ties to promotion and retention decisions.
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Studies point to the following levers for continuous improvement: • Peer collaboration – Veteran teachers continue to improve their skills if structures are in place that get them working with colleagues in focused, results-oriented instructional teams. • Teacher evaluation – The key is detailed, valid feedback on classroom practices and support for improvement from knowledgeable and well-trained administrators or peers. • Tailored on-the-job training – Most PD is ineffective, but intensive coaching focused on the specific needs of individual teachers and sustained over time can make a positive difference. • Organizational supports – These include an orderly, disciplined school environment, services available to address students’ social and emotional needs, and positive parent engagement. • Leadership – “Hiring principals who have the talent to identify organizational weaknesses, establish schoolwide systems to support teachers and students, and galvanize collective buy-in from teachers is a central lever for improving the teaching and learning environment,” conclude Papay and Kraft.
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Not having access to books in June, July, and August results in a two-month loss each summer for poor children compared to a one-month gain for more-advantaged children, and that accumulates over the years into a crushing achievement gap. Getting low-SES children reading over the summer is the most effective way to change that dynamic, but what works?
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a home library is as important as parental education and twice as important as the father’s occupation in predicting educational outcomes;
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Establish virtual office hours. Tucker tells students at the beginning of the year the dates and times when she’ll be available for a Google chat or Google Hangouts screen-sharing session. She has colleagues who tell students they can e-mail between 4:00 and 6:00 p.m. and any e-mails received after that will be answered the next day.
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Other reasons – These included racial concerns (for example, if a disproportionate number of minority teachers might receive low ratings); burdensome dismissal procedures; principals making deals in which teachers agreed to leave the school in exchange for a higher rating; and concern about ineffective replacement teachers.
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Set up a space where students can connect online. Tucker has a private Google+ community where students can share information, ask questions, and support one another.
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How and when I use my voice matters. “As I see it,” says Gannon, “my job requires that I advocate for both faculty members and students, and for both teaching and learning. Sometimes that means speaking truth to power; other times it means speaking truth to colleagues.” This is especially important with issues of gender, race, and bullying.
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“It’s all too easy to let the minutiae detract from the larger goal… I’m not useful to anyone I serve if I’m overcommitted.”
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Support, affirmation, and collegiality are more important. For me, leadership has become a matter of knowing and respecting my colleagues all over the campus, appreciating the work they do, and letting them know it… There’s no daily quota on thank you’s.”
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At their best, they promote academic achievement, stronger student connections to education, and improved initiative, teamwork, and social skills.
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Has a well-thought-out coaching philosophy aligned with the school’s educational, athletic, and programmatic goals – Winning isn’t the main goal, says Gould. Rather, “coaches work hard to help student-athletes learn important life lessons from their sport experiences.”
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effective coaches meet their athletes’ need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness in an atmosphere where students feel they belong.
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Builds strong coach-athlete relationships in a caring, supportive climate – Each athlete is known as an individual, made to feel welcome, and knows that bullying and belittling others isn’t tolerated on or off the field.
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Is a knowledgeable and effective teacher – “Research reveals that coaches who give positive versus degrading and punitive feedback or no feedback at all have athletes who are more motivated, feel better about themselves, and achieve more positive developmental outcomes from sports participation,” says Gould.
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Is intentional in fostering positive youth development – This includes attention to leadership, teamwork, and a work ethic.
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What these parents didn’t understand, says Jones, is that “You are either consistent, or you are inconsistent. There is nothing in between.”
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“The irony of consistency,” says Jones, “is that the closer you come to being consistent before you fail, the worse off you are. If the parent cracks easily, the child does not need to be a world-class yammerer in order to succeed. But, if the parent does not crack easily, the child must learn to play hardball.”
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How does this apply to classrooms? Teachers must set clear, reasonable expectations, says Jones, and then be absolutely consistent in enforcing them.
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If you are consistent, you can use smaller and smaller consequences to govern misbehavior. But if you are inconsistent, you must use larger and larger consequences to govern misbehavior.
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“it’s extremely unlikely you can greatly improve your reading speed without missing out on a lot of meaning…
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“If you want to improve your reading speed, your best bet – as old-fashioned as it sounds – is to read a wide variety of written material and expand your vocabulary.”
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you can’t take in words you don’t see, and you have a set-point for processing language that can be changed only by long-term improvements in vocabulary and knowledge.
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1. Why is it so difficult to improve the teacher-evaluation process? 2. Another look at the Measures of Effective Teaching study 3. Conditions for the continuous improvement of teaching 4. Counteracting summer reading loss 5. Using Reading Recovery techniques in guided reading groups 6. Keeping our technology use under control 7. Advice for leaders 8. The qualities of an effective high-school athletic coach 9. Consistency with classroom discipline 10. Are speed reading courses effective? 11. Short items: (a) World population growth animated; (b) Two centuries of U.S. immigration animated; (c) Common Core math sequence; (d) Survey on teacher evaluation
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The 'Maker' Movement Is Coming to K-12: Can Schools Get It Right? - Education Week - 0 views
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For all the excitement, though, there are also hurdles. One of the biggest: "Maker education" itself is a highly squishy concept. In general, the term refers to hands-on activities that support academic learning and promote experimentation, collaboration, and a can-do mindset. But in practice, educators use "making" to describe everything from formal STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) curricula to project-based classroom lessons to bins of crafting materials on a shelf in the library.
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Should making happen primarily in a dedicated space or inside every classroom? And is the purpose of maker education to help students better learn the established curriculum or to upend traditional notions of what counts as real learning?
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The whole point of maker education, Turner said, is to find new ways to engage students, especially those who have struggled to find a comfortable place inside school. It's a belief increasingly borne out by research. Academics have consistently found that making "gives kids agency" over their learning in ways that traditional classes often don't, said Erica Halverson, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There's also mounting evidence that making is a good way to teach academic content. "The fear out there is that schools have to choose between making and academic work, but empirically that turns out not to be true," Halverson said.
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New attention is being paid to designing spaces that are welcoming for girls, students of color, and immigrant and refugee students.
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At its root, the trend is being fueled by widespread fatigue with high-stakes standardized testing. The administration of President Barack Obama has also provided a policy boost, giving strong backing to STEM and computer science education and the redesign of schools. The sudden affordability of technologies such as 3-D printers, sensors, microprocessors, and laser cutters have exponentially expanded access to the tools for making. And, perhaps most importantly, the maker movement has also tapped into a deep desire among many educators to return to the type of instruction that drew them to teaching in the first place.
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Efforts to bring maker education into schools might be messy and uneven. But so far, at least, the process has often been characterized by enthusiasm and growth. Ultimately, Moran said, isn't that the point?
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1. What makes a team effective? 2. A new perspective on closing the achievement gap 3. Project-based learning 101 4. A school network experiments with high tech and student choice 5. Opening up a daily 40-minute block in a North Carolina high school 6. How to hold onto high-quality new teachers 7. The effect of reading about the struggles of accomplished scientists
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Project Aristotle, as it was dubbed, found that some team characteristics that seemed intuitively important – members sharing interests and hobbies, having similar educational backgrounds, socializing after hours – didn’t correlate with team success.
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Then Project Aristotle began looking at group norms – the culture of unwritten rules that guide people when they collaborate – and hit pay dirt. It turned out that two group norms were shared by virtually all of Google’s most effective teams: - Equal air time – In teams that got the best results, members participated roughly the same amount during meetings. “As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,” said Google researcher Anita Woolley. “But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.” - Interpersonal sensitivity – Effective team members had the ability to intuit how colleagues felt by their tone of voice, facial expressions, and other nonverbal cues. The members of less-effective teams were less tuned in to their teammates’ feelings.
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The behaviors that create psychological safety – conversational turn-taking and empathy – are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond. And those human bonds matter as much at work as anywhere else. In fact, they sometimes matter more.”
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He believes there are two “ubiquitous features of conventional school environments” that trigger and reinforce the psychological factors noted above, augment the disadvantages with which minority students enter school, and feed the peer pressures to disengage from schooling – all of which creates a self-reinforcing downward spiral of achievement. The two features are: - Students being given work that is too difficult for their current academic level; - Students getting low grades on their work rather than frequent, individualized, objective feedback.
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“The hypothesis,” say Yeh, “is that the conventional school system is inadvertently structured in a way that fosters disengagement, thereby reducing effort, which depresses achievement and grades, causing demoralization, which further reduces engagement and achievement.” The process kicks in around third grade, when struggling students begin to view themselves as intellectually inferior because their grades are lower than their classmates’, contributing to decreased self-efficacy and increasing passivity; it accelerates in middle school, at which point low grades strongly correlate with eventually dropping out.
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What is to be done? Yeh’s theory is that by flipping the two pernicious factors, schools can turn the downward spiral into a virtuous upward cycle of achievement. That involves: - Adjusting task difficulty for low-performing students to an appropriate level of challenge so that if they apply effective effort, they will be successful. - Rapid performance feedback with respect to a standard, not other students.
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He cites positive research on two programs using this approach – Reading Assessment and Math Assessment – and reports on a systematic study comparing different interventions aimed at closing the achievement gap – charter schools, voucher programs, an additional year of school, various high-quality pre-school programs, full-day kindergarten, class size reduction, value-added assessment, summer school, teacher salary incentives, teacher experience, teacher PD, longer school day, computer instruction, tutoring, and school reform. Rapid assessment is dramatically more successful at raising student achievement than any of the others.
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by far the most powerful and cost-effective intervention is to adjust task difficulty and provide students with prompt, objective feedback on their efforts.
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“When students engage in project-based learning over the course of their time in school,” says John Larmer (Buck Institute for Education) in this article in Educational Leadership, “there’s an accumulating effect. They feel empowered. They see that they can make a difference.” In addition, they’re more likely to acquire the skills, knowledge, and dispositions needed for college and career success.
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the key elements of project-based learning, carefully planned and skillfully managed by the teacher:
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four ways that project-based learning can go off the rails and not fulfill its potential: - Mistake #1: Using materials that aren’t truly project-based; beware of PBL-lite! - Mistake #2: Providing inadequate training and support for teachers; one-shot workshops are not enough. - Mistake #3: Over-using projects in the curriculum; basic skills can still be taught in a more conventional format. - Mistake #4: Implementing project-based learning on an ad hoc basis; to get the long-term effect, students need to engage in high-quality projects on a regular basis through their school years.
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AltSchools encourage students to dive into topics they’re passionate about, with teachers tracking everything they do using classroom video cameras and elaborate K-8 databases. The schools make a point of shaping diverse student bodies by giving scholarships to students whose parents can’t afford the $30,000-a-year tuition.
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We are raising a generation that will have the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips, for every minute of their life, so clearly education needs to change to accommodate that.”
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“Basically, what we have told teachers is we have hired you for your creative teacher brains, and anytime you are doing something that doesn’t require your creative teacher brain that a computer could be doing as well as or better than you, then a computer should do it.”
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To a computer measuring keystrokes, a student zoning out because he’s bored is indistinguishable from one who is moved by her book to imagine a world of her own.”
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“People are very focused on the algorithm. But equally important is the quality of the materials” – the clarity of the math questions and the worthiness of the readings being presented on students’ computer screens. Willingham also notes that teachers in high-tech classrooms often have to prepare two lesson plans – one that uses the technology and one for when the technology breaks down.
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Hire capable, well-matched teachers. Detailed advertisements and postings are important to giving candidates a clear idea of each position, says Clement. She also recommends longer interviews with more candidates, enlisting experienced teachers to take part in interviews, and gathering information on candidates from multiple sources.
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Provide continuous professional development. This should include induction that eases new teachers into the demands of the full job – orientation before classes begin, well-matched mentors through the first five years, and ongoing PD specific to rookies’ needs.
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Use colleagues to provide feedback. Traditional “gotcha” teacher evaluation has rarely been helpful in supporting new teachers, says Clement. Trained mentors can provide non-evaluative feedback that really makes a difference, perhaps with a firewall between their observations and the formal evaluation process. Of course it’s important that incoming teachers know the district’s criteria for effective teaching and are familiar with how administrators will assess their work.
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Understand millennials. “This generation of teachers wants to network and have input,” says Clement. Most have a strong preference for electronic interaction, and administrators and colleagues should meet young teachers where they are tech-wise and provide strong online resources.
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• Provide leadership opportunities. “While many new teachers are just surviving, others actively seek an avenue to truly make a difference,” says Clement. To find fulfillment in teaching and stay in the profession, they need to get involved in meaningful roles outside their classrooms. Some possibilities: speaking at induction ceremonies and serving on a welcome committee for the newest hires; leading book study groups; taking part in social service organizations on campus; and serving on curriculum committees
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students who read about scientists’ struggles, whether intellectual or personal, got better grades in science after reading the texts. The positive effect was most pronounced among students whose science grades were low before the experiment.
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Another finding: both before and after reading the texts, students who had a “growth” mindset (effort, not innate talent, determines success) tended to do better in science classes than students with a “fixed” mindset.
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Applying New Research to Improve Science Education | Issues in Science and Technology - 0 views
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The appropriate STEM educational goal should be to maximize the extent to which the learners develop expertise in the relevant subject, where expertise is defined by what scientists and engineers do.
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the value of the educational experiences should be measured by their effectiveness at changing the thinking of the learner to be more like that of an expert when solving problems and making decisions relevant to the discipline.
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My STEM/STEAM (STEAM - Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics) page: http://t.co/0tcPMAZA #STEMchat
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It has attracted huge numbers of free users though, raising questions about its business model, and its security record is not the best.
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Documents in Google Apps appear there, with extensions like .gdoc and .gsheet, and if you double-click them they open in your web browser. Offline editing is not supported. Still, you do not have to use Google Apps with Google Drive. Another issue is that Google may trawl your data to personalise your advertising and so on, which is uncomfortable – though when it comes to paid-for or educational services, Google says:Note that there is no ad-related scanning or processing in Google Apps for Education or Business with ads disabledGoogle Drive can be upgraded to 16TB, which is a factor if you want huge capacity online; but by this stage you should be looking at specialist services such as Amazon S3 and others as well.
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Digital Citizenship: Responsible Technology Use in the Classroom - 1 views
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Fifty-one percent of 16 year olds share their age/birth date with others Seventeen percent of teens keep their social network sites public and 19 percent only have some privacy settings enabled Twenty-nine percent of kids between five and 11 years old believe they are anonymous online Only a little over 50 percent of children age nine to 12 know how to block unwanted messages Nine percent of nine year olds share their email passwords and 24 percent of 18 year olds do the same Seventeen percent of male and 23 percent of female users would share inappropriate pictures online
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