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Steven Szalaj

Raise the bar with national exam for teachers - chicagotribune.com - 53 views

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    Editorial about a recommendation by the AFT Pres to develop a professional certification for teachers.  It's about time...
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    About time for what? For standardized tests to ruin the teaching profession like it has ruined our kids? For the government to control, from the top down, what education departments teach their students? Looks like a HUGE power grab and a very bad way for a Union, who professes to stand against standardized tests to act! Shame on them! Go to Fairtest.org to find out more about the scam of standardized testing. If you think a standardized test can improve education, you must also think you can fatten a calf by weighing it!
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    Michelle is right. More standardized testing is not the answer for anything, least of all teacher certification. Come on, Steven .. use your critical thinking skills. Don't encourage the bean counters and bureaucrats who are so enamored of things that can be measured and filed into neat categories. The most valuable things cannot be measured in any "objective" way. To focus on what's measurable is to focus on what's shallow.
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    Mark & Michelle, thank you for your comments. When I posted this I knew the words "standardized test" would be a flashpoint. It is for me too. With nearly 40 years in the classroom, teaching a creative art (music) to all different levels (kindergarten through college and well beyond), I have often railed against reducing any education, any student, to a number. Very little in what I have taught can be measured with a pencil-and-paper test. What I see here is different than this. It is the union that she is saying should be the "gate-keeper" to our profession, rather than some generic government standard test. Yes, tests would be a part of the certification, but from what I read, so would much more, including actual classroom work. The certification would be similar to the AMA for physicians or the Bar for attorneys. These are certifications designed and administered by the profession - not the government - and validate a candidate's readiness to practice. Yes, I too am strongly against the government, or any organization outside of our profession, to certify, to validate, a teacher's ability to do the job. But we have to admit there is a problem with teacher certification and validation. There are people who simply should not be in the classroom (haven't we all seen them?). It is very difficult to remove folks who are dragging the respect for our profession down. Yes, there is remediation. Yes, it should be a difficult process to remove someone in order to protect against administrative abuses. But what is talked about here is the profession policing itself - something that the teacher's unions, in general, have steadfastly refused to do. What the AFT Pres is suggesting is that the best thing we can do to raise the status of teaching as a profession is to take action ourselves to make it happen. Really, if we in the profession do not do this, then it will be imposed from those outside who do not know what we do, how we do it and why we do it.
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    You are still talking about a standardized test. Let's face it--doctors have to have specific knowledge to do their job. Whether or not they are creative or engaging is not as important as their knowledge base. The same with lawyers--knowledge of the law is essential, and everything else is secondary. However, in teaching, although educational theory and knowledge of their subject area is important (and already tested, by the way) the most essential aspect of teaching is how you can creatively engage students, interact with parents and peers, and stay organized and motivated. These things CAN'T BE TESTED. Right now, teachers already go through extensive training, evaluation, and continuing education. Do you REALLY think that a standardized test will really improve teaching? I know a lot of university professors who can easily pass a test, but few of them can teach worth beans.
mswanty

De-grade your classroom with narrative feedback SmartBlogs - 132 views

  • Grades, conversely, discourage learning, as students either feel like failures upon receiving low marks or have a falsely-inflated sense of accomplishment based on high marks, which are almost always subjective.
    • mswanty
       
      Do students feel this way?
  • SE2R — Summarize, Explain, Redirect and Resubmit
  • Since disdaining grades in favor of narrative feedback, I spend much more time doing what my colleagues call grading. I evaluate and re-evaluate student work daily. Project feedback is ongoing. I have 120 students so I’m writing seemingly all of the time. I’m often asked by teachers and friends, “Isn’t it a lot of work?”  Definitely. Would I ever return to traditional grading? Never.
    • mswanty
       
      So narrative grading takes more time, but it is worth it. I am still wondering what he puts on the report card...
    • Brianna Crowley
       
      Me too! I commented on this article with some of my own reservations or obstacles with implementing this in my own classroom.
D. S. Koelling

Plagiarizing Yourself - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 31 views

shared by D. S. Koelling on 05 Oct 10 - No Cached
msovoice liked it
  • Her presentation contained a slide that said academic dishonesty included plagiarizing yourself—i.e., taking a paper you had written for one course and turning it in for credit in another course. That, she explained, constituted a dishonest representation of your work for a course. "Unless," one of my colleagues chimed in at that point, "you're an academic, and you're presenting the same idea at a bunch of different conferences. Then it's clearly not dishonest."
  • counterargument
  • So does the injunction against plagiarizing from yourself fall into the category of one of those hypocritical rules that we like to impose on our children: Drinking soda every day would be bad for your health, honey, but it's fine for me? If a categorical difference exists here between what we do and what we forbid our students to do, I confess, I have a hard time seeing it.
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  • "Are we allowed to use ideas from our writing exercise to help us write this paper?" she asked. "Of course," I said. "That was the whole point of the writing exercise—to get you a head start in thinking about how you want to approach your paper." "OK," she said. And then after a brief pause: "Because at orientation they told us we weren't allowed to use our own work twice." "Ah," I said. "That doesn't really apply in this case. And anyway, I don't really mind, in this course, if you take a paper that you've written for another course and revise it for an assignment in here. You just have to make sure that what you turn in fulfills my specific assignment. Other professors might feel differently, though. So I would always ask before you tried to do that."
  • So why deprive our students of the opportunity to learn those same lessons, by recycling a particular paper from one course to the next?
  • I can foresee one more objection: What's to prevent a student from recycling the same paper from course to course to course? Students who did so would lose the valuable opportunity to practice their writing—and writing, like any other intellectual or physical skill, requires lots of practice. But—practically speaking—the opportunity to reuse a paper might arise only once or twice in a student's career, thanks to the diversity of our course assignments and disciplines.
  • First, do you see a problem with allowing students to revise a paper or presentation created for one course and turn it in for another one, assuming they can make it fit the assignment for the new course? Does this count as plagiarism? Second, are there any courses or programs that build such a process into the curriculum—requiring or encouraging students to take work from one course and adapt it for another? I encourage readers to offer their ideas. Of course if you have published or presented elsewhere on this subject, you should still go ahead and share your recycled idea. I will leave it up to you to decide whether to feel guilty about that.
Chai Reddy

Teacher Evaluations May Get a Video Assist - NYTimes.com - 26 views

  • Mr. Gates is tracking the research closely. The use of digital video in particular has caught his attention. In an interview, he cited its potential for evaluating teachers and for helping them learn from talented colleagues.
  • The meticulous scoring of videotaped lessons for this project is unfolding on a scale never undertaken in educational research, said Catherine A. McClellan, a director for the Educational Testing Service who is overseeing the process. By next June, researchers will have about 24,000 videotaped lessons. Because some must be scored using more than one protocol, the research will eventually involve reviewing some 64,000 hours of classroom video
Michelle Lynn

Best Practices - 2 views

  • the first great thing about Diigo is that your bookmarks follow you wherever you go.  When you bookmark a site using your Diigo account, you can have access to it at work, home, the computer lab or library.  The other great thing is that once you bookmark it, you can share your book mark links with students and colleagues and they can all have access to your sites.   
    • Amy Cordova
       
      This would be the first reason to use Diigo in the classroom
  • The next big plus to Diigo is that you get to “tag” the sites you want to bookmark.  A tag is the classification system you determine so you can organize your bookmarks and find the link the next time you need it; this is known as a folksonomy. 
  • On the sticky note the teacher could ask questions and Diigo allows people to comment and reply to the questions on the sticky note.  Students could also add sticky notes for other students to comment on as well.  Another way to use the highlighting tool is that students could go through an article and highlight all of the vocabulary that they didn’t know and learn what it means prior to reading the article.  Or students could put sticky notes about questions they have when reading the text. 
    • yang hongmei
       
      在便条中,教师可以提出问题,其他人可以通过便条回复.学生通读全文,高亮显示他们不懂的内容,在正式阅读前把它们学会.学生还可以在阅读时就他们不懂的部分添加便条提问.对教师而言,利用diigo获取学生在阅读时的所想也是很重要的.
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  • But, now let’s get to the “social” part of social bookmarking.  Let’s say you find a really awesome site for your unit on Greek Mythology, and you tag it on Diigo.  You see when you look at your bookmark list that 72 other people have tagged that exact same site.  You can see the lists of the other people who have tagged that site, and you might discover a 6th grade teacher in Wisconsin who has an amazing list of Greek mythology sites that you didn’t even know about.  Now you have taken advantage of the social part of the bookmarking process by adding some of those bookmarks to your list. 
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    Diigo - 21st Century Tool for Research, Reading and Collaboration
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    Why Diigo?
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    Diigo - 21st Century Tool for Research, Reading and Collaboration
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    diigo的应用文章 great
Joline Blais

Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We Know It - NYTimes.com - 33 views

  • GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).
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    This is a must read. Taylor's push to eliminate departments sounds much like what Liz Coleman did at Bennington a few years ago.
Casey Finnerty

The Poor Quality of an Undergraduate Education - NYTimes.com - 40 views

  • large numbers of the students were making their way through college with minimal exposure to rigorous coursework, only a modest investment of effort and little or no meaningful improvement in skills like writing and reasoning.
  • Simply put: academic investments are a lower priority.
  • When 18-year-olds are emboldened to see themselves in this manner, many look for ways to attain an educational credential effortlessly and comfortably. And they are catered to accordingly. The customer is always right.
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  • Too many institutions, for instance, rely primarily on student course evaluations to assess teaching. This creates perverse incentives for professors to demand little and give out good grades
  • Most of all, we hope that during this commencement season, our faculty colleagues will pause to consider the state of undergraduate learning and our collective responsibility to increase academic rigor on our campuses.
Justin Medved

What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? - NYTimes.com - 97 views

  • As Levin watched the progress of those KIPP alumni, he noticed something curious: the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence.
  • They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class.
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    I shared this article with several of my colleagues. I find it really interesting that someone in charge of such an elite private school that falls under such parent scrutiny has embraced this philosophy.
MIchael Heneghan

Economic Scene - Study Rethinks Importance of Kindergarten Teachers - NYTimes.com - 19 views

  • Early this year, Mr. Chetty and five other researchers set out to fill this void. They examined the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s. The children are now about 30, well started on their adult lives.
  • Just as in other studies, the Tennessee experiment found that some teachers were able to help students learn vastly more than other teachers. And just as in other studies, the effect largely disappeared by junior high, based on test scores. Yet when Mr. Chetty and his colleagues took another look at the students in adulthood, they discovered that the legacy of kindergarten had re-emerged.
anonymous

New Tools - LibGuides at Springfield Township High School - 134 views

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    Joyce Valenza and Kristen Swanson, have assembled a good collection of Web 2.0 tools and guides for teachers. The collection is part of STHS Library Guides. Their new tools catalog is organized by function (wikis, podcasting, etc) and topics related to technology use in schools (media literacy, fair use, privacy).  Applications for EducationIf you're the technology integration specialist or just the "techy" person that everyone goes to, the STHS Library New Tools is a good site to refer your colleagues to when they need a quick reference to learn about new tools.
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    This is a pretty decent collection of web tools and descriptions to pass along as references/resources of ed tech.
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    An amazing array of resources for education: digital storytelling, copyright/creative commons, tag clouds, mindmapping, digital citizenship and more.  Take 10 minutes to peruse this - impressive collection. Looks current, too.
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