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acob is your average American 11-year-old. He has a television and a Nintendo DS in his bedroom; his family also has two computers, a wireless Internet connection, and a PlayStation 3. His parents rely on e-mail, instant messaging, and Skype for daily communication, and they're avid users of Tivo and Netflix. Jacob has asked for a Wii for his upcoming birthday. His selling point? "Mom and Dad, we can use the Wii Fit and race Mario Karts together!"

Overview of PLC's with links to valuable resources.

Big thanks to the Oz-teachers list who provide the link. Go here if you want to join: http://lists.rite.ed.qut.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/oz-teachers Very useful the Professional Learning Teams at my school.

Conferences and events in Australia

9. In a post, you argue that the inquiry science teaching cannot flourish with common standards. What is an alternative solution?  That's right.  We do not need a set of Common Core Standards.  I am sure that the teachers in your high school are more capable of determining the curriculum for your classmates than any national committee assembled by the most prestigious organizations in the country.  Education needs to decentralized, not centralized.  There are more than 15,000 school districts in the United States.  Do you think that one set of standards would meet the needs of these 15, 000 school districts.

If a student improves, learns, and progresses beyond where he/she was when they entered my class, yet remains below "proficient," I am to receive a failing grade. I think success needs redefined.

I define a rule as what you enforce every time it's broken. Platitudes cannot be enforced because there is no line to cross, there's nothing predictable for students to understand, and they're too vague to be useful. In essence, these clumps allow teachers to enforce anything whenever they want under any conditions they chose. It's a get into jail free card. Rules aren't reduced by clumping them -- they are only hidden from students. Often, the only way students can find the real lines is by crossing them. This encourages rule breaking rather than stopping it.

I find, however, that if you inundate students with rules and consequences, especially when they are the same rules every time, students view these as your expectations of their behavior. When they believe you expect the worst from them, they will rise to that expectation. Many rules teachers make are actually procedures, as defined by Henry Wong. If we teach procedures instead, and simply reteach the procedure every time it is not followed, they eventually get tired of being retaught the procedure and just do it. I think what some in education forget is that students, no matter what age, expect and deserve respect, too. If we consistently offer respect and dignity, even when we aren't receiving it in return, the rest of the class notices and responds in return. There need to be some rules that are clearly stated with real enforceable consequences. They need to be only a few and very important. Every professional work place has a few. But we also need to send the clear message that school, as preparing them for the workplace that will not have a100 page rule book, is where we are showing them a model of behavior that is *implicitly* expected in every segment of society.

"Because so many educators have come to believe the myth of "the fewer rules, the better" (which I was taught in my teacher training program), they have developed what I call deception clumps. They throw as many rules as possible into a respectably titled non-communicative clump: "

This isn't just about online learning! How many of these roles do you fulfill as a teacher, "facilitator," or admin? How successful have professional development efforts been in getting teachers to try out new roles? How successful have they been in getting kids to try out some of these roles? What other roles are there for students?

Article comparing the lack of knowledge about the role of the educator at the moment with the blame put on 'bad teachers'.