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"Activities for Differentiated Instruction Addressing All Levels of Bloom's Taxonomy and Eight Multiple Intelligences." This title, by Audrey C. Rule and Linda Hurley Lord sounds too good to be true. This document is an 83-page gold mine. In the first eight pages, the introduction reviews the basics of both Bloom's and Gardner's work. Then it explains the qualities of differentiated instruction, referring to Tomlinson, as well as making the connections to Bloom and Gardner.

The Montgomery County Public Schools system here has a highly regarded program for evaluating teachers, providing them extra support if they are performing poorly and getting rid of those who do not improve. The program, Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) uses several hundred senior teachers to mentor both newcomers and struggling veterans. If the mentoring does not work, the PAR panel - made up of eight teachers and eight principals - can vote to fire the teacher.

from Will Richardson's "This is Not a Unit: Eight Shifts for Every Classroom (and Every Leaner)" presentation during ISTE 2011

This unavoidable and irreducible complexity means that schools are challenging place to study, to understand and to manage change within. Even for the teacher who spends everyday inside the school there is so much going on that unguided observations and the plans based upon them come with no guarantee of success. - We need a lens and a lever to manage this complexity. -  Such a lens is offered by the 'cultural forces'.

At the heart of mathematics are a set of connected thinking dispositions. The mathematician uses these dispositions as the cognitive tools of their trade. While the traditional imagining of mathematics might be all about the accurate application of well-rehearsed algorithms and processes, in the real world of mathematics, it is all about the thinking. As we consider what our students need from their mathematical education, we should not overlook the importance of these dispositions. 

Asa Spencer of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute writes in the Education Gadfly Weekly: "Traditionalists cringe, tech buffs rejoice: This latest NAEP writing assessment for grades eight and twelve marks the first computer-based appraisal (by the "nation's report card") of student proficiency in this subject. It evaluates students' writing skills (what NAEP calls both academic and workplace writing) based on three criteria: idea development, organization, and language facility and conventions. Results were predictably bad: Just twenty-four percent of eighth graders and 27 percent of twelfth graders scored proficient or above. Boys performed particularly poorly; half as many eighth-grade males reached proficiency as their female counterparts. The use of computers adds a level of complexity to these analyses: The software allows those being tested to use a thesaurus (which 29 percent of eighth graders exploited), text-to-speech software (71 percent of eighth graders used), spell check (three-quarters of twelfth graders), and kindred functions. It is unclear whether use of these crutches affected a student's "language facility" scores, though it sure seems likely. While this new mechanism for assessing kids' writing prowess makes it impossible to track trend data, one can make (disheartening) comparisons across subjects. About a third of eighth graders hit the NAEP proficiency benchmark in the latest science, math, and reading assessments, compared to a quarter for writing. So where to go from here? The report also notes that twelfth-grade students who write four to five pages a week score ten points higher than those who write just one page a week. Encouraging students to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) is a start."

"Google and Stanford are more than just neighbors in Silicon Valley. They're becoming the leaders in the online learning revolution. And it's all happening fast and starting right about … now. Stanford, like Google, has now announced a free and open source platform that lets you run your very own Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Stanford's platform, dubbed Class2Go, has big and slightly different aspirations from its competitors. Developed as a non-profit project by eight Stanford Computer Science engineers, Class2Go is meant to offer not only a course-like project but also tools for collaborative research. The latter functionality is a change from what Google, edX, Coursera, and others are offering right now."

To help states, districts, teachers, and other users determine the degree of alignment of Open Educational Resources (OERs) to the Common Core State Standards, and to determine aspects of quality of OERs, Achieve has developed eight rubrics in collaboration with leaders from the OER community.

"Throughout the world, children experience and manage risk as a part of their everyday lives. But growing up poor may be a particular source of vulnerability and disadvantage for children, especially where they are confronted with gross inequalities. The global challenge is huge. By 2015, it is estimated that nearly one-third of the world's population will be under the age of 14. At the same time, children are disproportionately represented among the world's poor. More than 30 per cent of children in developing countries - about 600 million - live on less than US $1 a day (UNICEF, 2008). In this special issue of Children & Society, we present eight papers focusing on children's everyday experiences of poverty and risk in developing country contexts.

Earlier this year a group of teachers I work with explored the 'Eight Cultural Forces' identified by Ron Ritchhart of Harvard's Project Zero. In doing so we decided to focus on our use of the term learning instead of the word work. Our goal was to bring our language choices into the spotlight and explore how a more deliberate focus on learning might alter the culture of our classrooms. Two terms later this focus persists and it is worth reflecting on the effect that this has had.

"Research has shown that teenagers don't get enough sleep at night and go to school tired. Some experts believe the cause is biological. Others believe that teenagers stay up late because of adolescent distractions. Early high school start times can also contribute to teens' tiredness. This article will explore possible causes and solutions to this problem."

Bruce Larkin, the published author of over eight hundred early children's books, including the extremely popular Larkin's Little Readers Series, is pleased to announce IRA & RR Reading Conference Grants.

"This is the first of eight videos in our Future Learning series, which explores technology in the classroom."