It simply doesn’t make sense to try
to “purge ‘ineffective’ teachers and principals.” His listener, almost giddy
with gratitude now, prepares to chime in, as Samuelson, without pausing, delivers
the punch line: That’s right, it’s time to stop blaming teachers and start .
. . blaming students!
Group items tagged
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shared by Jason Schmidt on 17 Nov 10
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School Would Be Great If It Weren't for the Damn Kids - 95 views
www.alfiekohn.org/...damnkids.htm
school alfie kohn students edreform education interest current commentary
shared by Jason Schmidt on 17 Nov 10
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His focus is not on students’ achievements (the intellectual accomplishments of individual kids) but only on “student achievement” (the aggregate results of standardized tests)
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As I’ve noted elsewhere, we have reason to worry when schooling is discussed primarily in the context of “global competitiveness” rather than in terms of what children need or what contributes to a democratic culture
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Upon hearing someone castigate students for being insufficiently motivated, a noneconomist might be inclined to ask two questions. The first is: “Motivated to do what, exactly”? Anything they’re told, no matter how unengaging, inappropriate, or, well, demotivating?
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Whenever I see students made to cram facts into their short-term memories for a test, practice a series of decontextualized skills on yet another worksheet, listen passively to a lecture, or inch their way through the insipid prose of a corporate-produced textbook, I find myself thinking of a comment made by Frederick Herzberg, a critic of traditional workplace management: “Idleness, indifference, and irresponsibility,” he said, “are healthy responses to absurd work.”
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The more you reward people for doing something, or for doing it well, the less interest they typically come to have in whatever they had to do to get the reward.
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People who blame students for not being “motivated” tend to think educational success mean little more than higher scores on bad tests and they’re apt to see education itself as a means to making sure our corporations will beat their corporations. The sort of schooling that results is the type almost guaranteed to . . . kill students’ motivation.
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one thing that’s happened is a concatenation of rewards and punishments, including grades, which teach students that learning is just a means to an end.
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Another thing that’s happened is teaching that’s meant primarily to raise test scores.
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inner-city kids get the worst of the sort of schooling that’s not about exploring and discovering and questioning but only about working hard (often at rote tasks) and being nice (read: obedient).
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“Motivation is weak because more students…don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well.” But why don’t they like school (which is the key to understanding why, assuming his premise is correct, they don’t succeed)? What has happened to their desire to figure out how things work, the hunger to make sense of things, with which all children start out?
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if you want to see (intrinsically) motivated kids, you need to visit classrooms or schools that take a nontraditional approach to education, places where students are more likely to be absorbed and frequently delighted, where what they’re doing is not merely “rigorous” (a word often applied to very difficult busywork) but meaningful.
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Alfie Kohn's commentary on an article written by Robert J. Samuelson. Samuelson argues in his article that the problem with education reform is not the usual suspects like ineffective teachers, but kids who are lazy and unmotivated. Interesting read with thoughtful information about student motivation.
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Clive Thompson on the New Literacy - 3 views
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The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.
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The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision.
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When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn't find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.
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Stanford 1st year students - check the applicant profile - http://www.stanford.edu/dept/uga/basics/selection/profile.html These are among the top tiered students in the country.
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know is that knowing who you're writing for and why you're writing might be the most crucial factor of all.
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young people today write far more than any generation before them
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(something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good
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kids today can't write—and technology is to blame.
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"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions
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Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment
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Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across.
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students today almost always write for an audience
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(something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good
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IXL Math | - 63 views
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This is a vast resource site with activities covering the whole maths curriculum. There is a 'paid for' section, but most of the activities are free and can be used without signing in. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/maths -
If your school can afford the pay version, do it! My 5th grade students practiced and answered over 5000 questions in the first 4 weeks of school! -
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Online Courses Should Always Include Proctored Finals, Economist Warns - Wired Campus -... - 34 views
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Online economics students do not absorb much material from homework and chapter tests during the semester—perhaps because they expect to be able to cheat their way through the final exam.
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she has noticed that her online students perform much worse than their classroom-taught counterparts when they are required to take a proctored, closed-book exam at the end of the semester.
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Ms. Wachenheim’s findings parallel those of a 2008 study in the Journal of Economic Education. That study found indirect evidence that students cheat on unproctored online tests, because their performance on proctored exams was much more consistent with predictions based on their class ranks and their overall grade-point averages.
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Those include insisting on a proctored final exam and reminding students of that exam “early, often, and broadly, so students are ever-conscious that they will be responsible for the material in an unaided environment.”
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"In self-paced courses, many students appeared to cram most of the homework and chapter exams into the final week of the semester. Few of them bothered to do the ungraded practice problems offered by the online publisher." First, where is the teaching? It sounds more like a case of poorly designed instruction...or a complete lack of instruction. Of course these students are not learning...they are not being taught. Also, if they are in classes which are actively taught by a teacher, then where are the formative assessments by the instructors? That teacher should know long before the final exam if the students know the material or not. A good teacher and a well developed online course would have a number of ways to determine this which do not allow for "cut and paste" or cheating. Finally, does this department test a student's memorization of material or the mastery of the concepts and and understanding of how to apply those concepts? Perhaps, there is also a need to reevaluate the assessments. Good teaching is good teaching. If a student is not learning the material, who is really to blame?
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The Default Major - Skating Through B-School - NYTimes.com - 41 views
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Dr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they’ve always been. But many of them don’t read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. “We used to complain that K-12 schools didn’t hold students to high standards,” he says with a sigh. “And here we are doing the same thing ourselves.”
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all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in Dr. Mason’s domain: undergraduate business education.
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“Business education has come to be defined in the minds of students as a place for developing elite social networks and getting access to corporate recruiters,”
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It’s an attitude that Dr. Khurana first saw in M.B.A. programs but has migrated, he says, to the undergraduate level.
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Second, in management and marketing, no strong consensus has emerged about what students ought to learn or how they ought to learn it.
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Gains on the C.L.A. closely parallel the amount of time students reported spending on homework. Another explanation is the heavy prevalence of group assignments in business courses: the more time students spent studying in groups, the weaker their gains in the kinds of skills the C.L.A. measures.
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The pedagogical theory is that managers need to function in groups, so a management education without such experiences would be like medical training without a residency. While some group projects are genuinely challenging, the consensus among students and professors is that they are one of the elements of business that make it easy to skate through college.
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“We’ve got students who don’t read, and grow up not reading,” he says. “There are too many other things competing for their time. The frequency and quantity of drinking keeps getting higher. We have issues with depression. Getting students alert and motivated — even getting them to class, to be honest with you — it’s a challenge.”
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“A lot of classes I’ve been exposed to, you just go to class and they do the PowerPoint from the book,” he says. “It just seems kind of pointless to go when (a) you’re probably not going to be paying much attention anyway and (b) it would probably be worth more of your time just to sit with your book and read it.”
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“It seems like now, every take-home test you get, you can just go and Google. If the question is from a test bank, you can just type the text in, and somebody out there will have it and you can just use that.”
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This is not senioritis, he says: this is the way all four years have been. In a typical day, “I just play sports, maybe go to the gym. Eat. Probably drink a little bit. Just kind of goof around all day.” He says his grade-point average is 3.3.
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concrete business skills tend to expire in five years or so as technology and organizations change.
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History and philosophy, on the other hand, provide the kind of contextual knowledge and reasoning skills that are indispensable for business students.
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when they hand in papers, they’re marked up twice: once for content by a professor with specialized expertise, and once for writing quality by a business-communication professor.
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a national survey of 259 business professors who had been teaching for at least 10 years. On average, respondents said they had reduced the math and analytic-thinking requirements in their courses. In exchange, they had increased the number of requirements related to computer skills and group presentations.
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what about employers? What do they want? According to national surveys, they want to hire 22-year-olds who can write coherently, think creatively and analyze quantitative data, and they’re perfectly happy to hire English or biology majors. Most Ivy League universities and elite liberal arts colleges, in fact, don’t even offer undergraduate business majors.
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Digitally Speaking / Blogging - 169 views
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Using Feed Readers
Feed readers are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for anyone.
Imagine never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it?
It's not! Here's a Commoncraft tutorial explaining RSS Feeds in Plain English:
Feed readers can quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for their students.
Here are several examples of feed readers in action:
Student Blogs
http://www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/20982438
This feed list includes several elementary, middle and high school blogs that students can explore during silent reading or while online at home.
Current Events
http://www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/16714925
This feed list includes links to several news websites that cover topics that are a part of one teacher's required social studies curriculum.
Global Warming
http://www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/22534539
Used specifically as a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader programs to choose from (Bloglines and Google Reader are two biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no longer interested in.
What's even better: Pageflakes has been developing a teacher version of their tool just for us that includes an online grade tracker, a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital home for students.
For more information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this review:
http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/the_tempered_radical/2008/02/pageflakes-for.html
For more information on using feed readers to organize and manage information, check out this handout:
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A guide to online educational resources. - NYTimes.com - 90 views
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Richard Ludlow started the nonprofit Academic Earth two years ago after M.I.T.'s OpenCourseWare helped him pass linear algebra as a Yale undergraduate. His site offers the courses of 10 elite universities — 130 full courses and more than 3,500 video lectures. Viewers can turn the tables on professors and grade courses. Other guidance includes "Editor's Picks" and "Playlists," lectures selected around a theme like "First Day of Freshman Year" and "You Are What You Eat."
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Connexions, started at Rice University 10 years ago, debundles education for the D.I.Y. learner. Anyone can write a "module," the term for instructional material that can be a single sentence or 1,000 pages. Connexions hosts more than 16,000 modules that make up almost 1,000 "collections." A collection might be, say, an algebra textbook or statistics course.
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Daniel Colman is a curator of sorts. He sifts through the vast amount of free courses, movies and books offered online to find what he considers the very best in content and production value. Then he features them on Open Culture, the Web site he founded in 2006. It's a task in keeping with his mission as associate dean and director of Stanford's continuing education program.
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At last count, the site had 2,700 audio and video lectures from more than 25 universities; 268 audio books; and 105 e-books. Dr. Colman says he looks for lectures that "take ideas and make them come to life." And so you can learn 37 languages on Open Culture, or stream Jane Austen audio books, Hitchcock films and a John Hopkins biology lecture.
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Why pay for test prep? M.I.T. OpenCourseWare has culled introductory courses in physics, calculus and biology, along with problem sets and labs, to help students prep for the Advanced Placement exams. (Not to miss an opportunity, there’s a link to the admissions office.)
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Thousands of pieces of free educational material - videos and podcasts of lectures, syllabuses, entire textbooks - have been posted in the name of the open courseware movement. But how to make sense of it all? Businesses, social entrepreneurs and "edupunks," envisioning a tuition-free world untethered by classrooms, have created Web sites to help navigate the mind-boggling volume of content. Some sites tweak traditional pedagogy; others aggregate, Hulu-style. -
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A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 40 views
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at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years."
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What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students?
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students in math, science, humanities, and social sciences—rather than those in more directly career-oriented fields—tend to show the most growth in the areas measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the primary tool used in their study. Also, students learn more from professors with high expectations who interact with them outside of the classroom. If you do more reading, writing, and thinking, you tend to get better at those things, particularly if you have a lot of support from your teachers.
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Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities.
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It has become difficult to give students honest feedback.
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As the college-age population declines, many tuition-driven institutions struggle to find enough paying customers to balance their budgets. That makes it necessary to recruit even more unprepared students, who then must be retained, shifting the burden for academic success away from the student and on to the teacher.
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Although a lot of emphasis is placed on research on the tenure track, most faculty members are not on that track and are retained on the basis of what students think of them.
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Students gravitate to lenient professors and to courses that are reputedly easy, particularly in general education.
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It is impossible to maintain high expectations for long unless everyone holds the line in all comparable courses—and we face strong incentives not to do that.
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Formerly, full-time, tenured faculty members with terminal degrees and long-term ties to the institution did most of the teaching. Such faculty members not only were free to grade honestly and teach with conviction but also had a deep understanding of the curriculum, their colleagues, and the institutional mission. Now undergraduate teaching relies primarily on graduate students and transient, part-time instructors on short-term contracts who teach at multiple institutions and whose performance is judged almost entirely by student-satisfaction surveys.
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Contingent faculty members, who are paid so little, routinely teach course loads that are impossible to sustain without cutting a lot of corners.
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Many colleges are now so packed with transient teachers, and multitasking faculty-administrators, that it is impossible to maintain some kind of logical development in the sequencing of courses.
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Students may be enjoying high self-esteem, but college teachers seem to be suffering from a lack of self-confidence.
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Getting A Job Is Not The Purpose Of School - 41 views
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By calling it “school” (rather than learning), and “a job” (rather than work), we’re unwittingly creating a tone of drudgery and compliance that centers the institutions and their processes (grades, academic success and performance), and de-centers the end result (skills–>understanding–>creativity–>wisdom).
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the vast majority of social ills that plague us–as a planet, not just in one country–stem from a surplus of bad work
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And because we’ve all had jobs that sucked, it’s easy to shrug it off as a necessary evil in life, but it’s not. Work that demeans, dehumanizes, mechanizes, and depersonalizes individuals also, by design, demean, dehumanize, mechanize, and depersonalize society at large, and telling people to “be thankful they have a job” is an antiquated response that misses the point.
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The curse of social conditioning and norm-referencing here is also at play
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Wendell Berry in a letter he wrote responding to the idea of a “work-life” balance
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Only in the absence of any viable idea of vocation or good work can one make the distinction implied in such phrases as “less work, more life” or “work-life balance,” as if one commutes daily from life here to work there.
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If such questions are not asked, then we have no way of seeing or proceeding beyond the assumptions of (the author) and his work-life experts: that all work is bad work; that all workers are unhappily and even helplessly dependent on employers; that work and life are irreconcilable; and that the only solution to bad work is to shorten the workweek and thus divide the badness among more people.”
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no matter what sort of values a family promotes, the learning process, by design, changes a person
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Doesn’t the quality of a culture rely in part on a deep, dynamic interaction between those who are adults now, and those who will be soon?” And in that intersection sits education.
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Getting a job is not the purpose of school. Good work is a shared core of both education and social improvement. I’m not entirely sure what this means for learning on a practical level, but I keep having the idea of diverse learning forms embedded in authentic local communities as a kind of first response.
Great Websites for First Grade - 62 views
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The First Thanksgiving Student Activities for Grades PreK-12 | Scholastic.com - 71 views
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your Classroom
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Decorate your Classroom
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shared by smilex3md on 03 Sep 15
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10 Things Every College Professor Hates - Business Insider - 42 views
www.businessinsider.com/college-professor-hates-2014-8
college professor teaching learning list hate socy201
shared by smilex3md on 03 Sep 15
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1. Don’t use unprofessional correspondence.
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2. Don’t ask the professor if you “missed anything important” during an absence.
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4. Don’t ask a question about the readings or assignments until checking the syllabus first.
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3. Don’t pack up your things as the class is ending.
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6. Don’t grade grub.
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5. Don’t get mad if you receive critical feedback.
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7. Don’t futz with paper formatting.
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8. Don’t pad your introductions and conclusions with fluff.
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9. Don’t misrepresent facts as opinions and opinions as facts.
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10. Don’t be too cool for school.
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Newsroom | Alliance for Childhood - 1 views
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In many kindergarten classrooms there is no playtime at all. Teachers say the curriculum does not incorporate play, there isn’t time for it, and many school administrators do not value it.
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Then you can't really blame teachers here. Policy/curriculum has to change.
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“We have had a politically and commercially driven effort to make kindergarten a one-size-smaller first grade. Why in the world are we trying to teach the elementary curriculum at the early childhood level?”
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Finnish children similarly have a lengthy and playful childhood, not beginning formal schooling until age 7. Yet Finland consistently gets the highest scores on international exams.
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Crisis in the Kindergarten describes the current state of public kindergartens in the U.S. as “a national disgrace.”
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New studies show play losing out to formal lessons and tests, even though multiple benefits of imaginative play are well documented
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Using Diigo in the Classroom - Student Learning with Diigo - 66 views
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Save important websites and access them on any computer. Categorize websites by titles, notes, keyword tags, lists and groups. Search through bookmarks to quickly find desired information. Save a screenshot of a website and see how it has changed over time. Annotate websites with highlighting or virtual "sticky notes." View any annotations made by others on any website visited. Share websites with g
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Extended Learning
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Bookmark Lists
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Personal Student Bookmarks
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Diigo can provide a way to enrich or extend learning about a topic.
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Beyond extended student learning, Diigo can be used as a form of professional development.
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Research Teaching students to research is a common standard across all grade levels, elementary, middle school, high school, and beyond. Diigo excels as a research tool: Students can save relevant websites to lists in their Diigo student accounts. Each saved bookmark captures the URL and a screenshot, and can be searched later. Students can highlight important information right on the website, using Diigo. Later, when students return to the website, they find the reason they saved the bookmark in the first place. Students can use virtual sticky notes to summarize the important points of information from the website. This activity will mimic the time-tested procedure of using note cards to summarize and organize research projects. Students working on similar topics can create and join groups in order to collaborate. Later, when students need to document their sources, Diigo can be used to recall website URLs for citing sources.
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How in the WORLD do I do the social part of it?? This seems useful, but I'm still trying to figure out how to let the kids collaborate on Outliners and then share the Outliners with me easily. I bet there's something huge that I'm missing here...
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