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Matt Renwick

Charter School Study Finds High Teacher Pay Helps Students - WSJ - WSJ - 20 views

  • After four years at the charter school, eighth-graders showed average test score gains in math equal to an additional year and a half of school, compared with district students.
  • an extra half-year in science and almost an extra half-year in English
  • the charter has a lean administrative staff and slightly larger classes—31 students compared with an average of about 26 or 27 in district schools—so it can pour resources into teacher pay and training.
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  • Teachers are observed by colleagues and get feedback weekly, and they have four weeks of full-day professional development each year.
  • Days are long, with teachers at work from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and students attending from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
  • Many teachers don’t last. Of 43 hired during the four years studied, 47% didn’t return for a second year, in most cases because they weren’t asked back.
    • Matt Renwick
       
      I wonder why - performance, or too much stress due to longer hours and out of work expectations? Regardless, this high turnover rate has got to impact the kids in the end.
  • Critics of charter schools say, among other complaints, that they drain money from regular public schools, skim talented students and nudge out disruptive ones.
  •  
    mattrenwick.com
Julia Gardiner

Lateline - 29/10/2012: PMs plan for every child to learn an Asian language - 14 views

    • Julia Gardiner
       
      The rationale or thinking behind introducing languages early in primary school
  • Gillard Government's Asian Century white paper sets an aspiration for Australia to rank as the world's 10th biggest economy by 2025, capitalising on the rapid economic growth in the region.
  • education will be the key and wants all school students to study an Asian language.
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  • funded
  • where all the new teachers might come from
  • where all the new teachers might come from.
  • the gold standard
    • Julia Gardiner
       
       The gold standard =any excellent example of something, like how Olympians are the gold standard for athletes
  • If you understand through the learning of language how people think, how they construct meaning, what is important to them culturally, then I think that gives us better insights into the people that we're going to be working with in the future and negotiating with.
  • The Prime Minister says she'll force the curriculum changes by tying them to Commonwealth funding to state and private schools.
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      Is this  good policy making? Some would  consider  it 'blackmail'!
  • Broadly, teachers and education experts have welcomed the plan, but question where the money is going to come from.
  • catchcry of the Hawke and Keating governments
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      The Hawke-Keating Government refers to the Federal Government of Australia from 11 March 1983 to 11 March 1996. It was a Labour government
  • Currently across all levels of schooling there's around 18 per cent of our young people who are studying one of the four priority Asian languages: Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Korean. And that diminishes to fewer than 6 per cent by the time they get to Year 12.
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      How do we encourage students to  continue  learning an Asian language into the final years  of high school and  eyond?
  • say we simply don't have enough Asian language teachers to deliver the Prime Minister's vision and for the last decade the numbers of graduates have been declining.
  • hat's happened because universities have been under these budget constraints and when they've made decisions about what to cut, they cut courses with low enrolments and there goes the languages.
  • JEANNIE REA, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL TERTIARY EDUCATION UNION
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      Suggested reasons for the decline in language graduates and therefore  in language teachers. 
  • will help.JULIA GILLARD: We live in an age of different learning possibilities and choices. What we can do through the National Broadband Network, what we can do through having the world's first online national curriculum, which is what the Australian curriculum is, means we can get a deeper penetration of language, literacy and learning.
  • e Prime Minister acknowledges the shortages, but says technology
  • will help.
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      This argument t can be debated.  It would suggest that technology in itself will be a solution!
  • we need to be looking very carefully at what sort of encouragement and incentives we can provide to students so they continue doing a language, go on and major in a language in university and then go on to teach in the area.
  • JEANNIE REA:
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      What type of incentive scan be offered/
  •  
    The Prime Minister wants all school students to study an Asian language to secure Australia's future in the Asian Century.
  •  
    Completely deluded. Even here in Singapore, surrounded supposedly by chinese speakers the international schools are not getting it right and success stories are unusual ...
Matt Renwick

Minecraft Will Eat Your School - 63 views

  • GeekDad: What is the magic that Minecraft adds to a classroom that any other collaborative game might not? Mikael: In a single word, engagement.
  • What schools miss is the chance for reflection to make that learning more explicit
  • Whatever schools decide to do, games will continue teaching the players.
  •  
    "Whatever schools decide to do, games will continue teaching the players. What schools miss is the chance for reflections to make that learning more explicit."
Sharin Tebo

High School Graduates Feel Unprepared For College and Work, Survey Finds - College Bound - Education Week - 44 views

  • 5. Have an assessment late in high school so students can find out what they need for college (77 percent.)
    • Sharin Tebo
       
      What kind of assessment? I mean, if it is a standardized test, does that really help students prepare for life, whether college-bound or not? 
  • So, how can high schools better serve students and bridge this divide? Respondents' top suggestions for change: 1. Provide opportunities for real-world learning (90 percent);
  • A recent survey of public high school graduates finds about half feel they are unprepared for life after high school and most would have worked harder if they had realized the expectations of college and the workplace.
  •  
    I'm not so sure that I believe that less than 1,500 graduates nationwide over the span of just three graduating classes is exactly representative of all high school grads in America, but at least it was conducted by a nonprofit and not one of our education deformer companies or a textbook publisher. Also, isn't a certain amount of laissez-faire attitude a normal teenage brain condition? "I wish I'd paid more attention in high school" was a major theme of conversation at *my* 20 year high school reunion last year (did I just date myself)  BUT I did feel better prepared in study skills and habits, perhaps because in 1993 we weren't so test-centered. Just sayin' Thanks for sharing!
Andrew McCluskey

Occupy Your Brain - 111 views

  • One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
  • Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed.  The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even  use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
  • In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
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  • In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy.   We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect. 
  • We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
  • And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
  • The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
  • by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
  • We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
  • A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
  • The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups.  Our votes no longer matter.  Our wishes no longer count.  Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
  • Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
  • If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations?  What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
  • The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors.  Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
  • the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person.   Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa.  Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been.   But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
  • This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning. 
  • If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience?  Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
  • We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press.   At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
  • Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
  • But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
  • Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results. 
  • You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
  • if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
  • They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
  • And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
  • They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side.  Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either.  So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
  • As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us?  To what end?  The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks.  But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense. 
  • They must occupy their brains.
  • Isn’t it time for us to do the same?
  •  
    Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012).
  •  
    This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
Kelly Sereno

SIRS: Turn Off the Cell and Tune In - 64 views

    • Kelly Sereno
       
      con - Argument #2
  • There is an epidemic of under-the-desk text messages during class, a virtual economy of exam pictures posted to Facebook, a trade in school fight videos on YouTube, they say. To combat it, the county school board voted Thursday to ban cellphones and other electronics during the school day, even as many school systems across the country are loosening their rules.
  •  
    No cell phone use in schools - text messages, cheating, school fights
Martin Burrett

Back to school essentials, for teachers - 55 views

  •  
    There is so much publicity and marketing around for the 'Back to school' push, and here in the UK it starts back in June as retailers grapple to win custom. But students are not the only ones returning to school after a pro-longed break, so we asked teachers what their essential items are to buy, before returning back for another school year. Here are the top 15 items, in no particular order, and you can see the responses in the Storify summary...
Martin Burrett

Book: Developing Tenacity by @LucasLearn & @DrEllenSpencer - 2 views

  •  
    "What are those key phrases you hear from frustrated teachers in the staffroom during breaks? Or on those rare occasions, you get to meet up with teachers from other schools on training courses? For me it is the following: 'They give up so easily,' 'Where is their stickability?' 'Why do they fear making a mistake?' However it is phrased, you get the gist, that pupils today have no resilience, they aren't prepared to keep going in the face of challenge or set back. They can't think their way around a problem. In discussions with staff within my own school (a large primary in an area of high deprivation in the north of England) I am frequently asked how we can help these children. As part of our school's SLT I have already supported staff to make daring changes to our curriculum but we still seem to be falling short of what we state in our vision; that we want our children to become resilient learners, confident individuals, critical thinkers and lifelong learners. (Traits that I am sure many schools up and down the land wish for their pupils to develop.) Why are our pupils struggling with 'resilience'? What opportunities can we, as a school, provide our children so that they develop these skills? After reading the blurb and the introductory pages, I was, as you can imagine, excited to delve further into this book to see if it could answer some of my questions."
Martin Burrett

Teachers as Advisors and Mentors by @RTBCoaching - 3 views

  •  
    "During the last 18 months, I have served as the mathematics teacher for an alternative high school in Nederland, CO. Our school operates with three full-time instructors and several support staff who teach various electives. One unique feature of our school is the advisory program. New students, within the first week of attendance, must interview each staff member. This provides an opportunity to meet every adult in the school and assists in the advisor-advisee matching process. The students provide three choices of adults to serve as their advisor until graduation."
Martin Burrett

Disadvantaged students with lower grades do just as well on medical degrees - 6 views

  •  
    "Students from some of England's worst-performing secondary schools who enrol on medical degrees with lower A Level grades, on average, do at least as well as their peers from top performing schools, a new study has revealed. The research also found that students from poorly performing schools who match the top A-Level grades achieved by pupils from the best performing schools, go on to do better during a medical degree."
Martin Burrett

Kindness by @sheep2763 - 3 views

  •  
    "It may always be possible but life is busy and although I don't think that most people (including me) intend to be unkind they can sometimes be thoughtless rather than unkind. At school amongst other bits and pieces, I oversee the School Council. Our School Council consists of children from Y1 to Y6 and at a recent meeting, they brought their suggestions as to what we could do to make our school even better. They came up with several suggestions including Reintroduce Random Acts of Kindness awards Reintroduce Headteacher awards"
Martin Burrett

Key components of a mentally healthy school - 24 views

  •  
    "Mentally healthy schools are schools that pay ongoing and dedicated attention to the emotional wellbeing of both students and staff and put in place policies and interventions to ensure that students and staff feel cared for, listened to, understand, nurtured and valued for what each of them, individually bring to the school community."
Martin Burrett

Dads Matter by @PaulStrange - 4 views

  •  
    "In our school this year, we are focusing on raising the attainment of boys in relation to their female peers. This is by no means anything new; the gender gap is an entity that has plagued school results for as long as I can remember (and probably long before that). I should say that our boys perform better than national averages, but do not perform as well as the girls. You might be sat there in the same position. You've got an interesting situation in your school, where girls are outperforming boys, it features prominently on your School Improvement Plan (SIP), and you've read all the new books on the subject etc."
Martin Burrett

Well-being School Proposal, by @Mrs_Educate - 2 views

  •  
    "This is a proposal with many good ideas gained from different places (Facebook and Twitter) that could be put to school leaders/governors to try and integrate staff well-being into the school policies. Just add in you school name in the gaps and add your name at the bottom!"
Martin Burrett

EdTech Lunch with @ICTMagic highlights way to get rid of needless school e-mails - 5 views

  •  
    "In the first of a series of 5 webinars, Martin Burrett (@ICTMagic) showcased innovative ways that school leaders and teachers can eliminate the bulk of e-mails out of their school lives. Using online, collaborative communication tools, teachers and school leaders can easily send messages to each other, with fantastic tools that allow users to 'turn off notifications', or turning on 'snooze mode'. Such features help in that messages only arrive when the user specifies, therefore eliminating the need to deal with e-mails when they arrive at a time when individuals should be resting."
Martin Burrett

Talking Transition - 7 views

  •  
    "Moving from one school to another is a seminal moment in the lives of young people. Ensuring a smooth start can change how a pupil sees school, their education and their future. Preparing adquently for a new school, or even a new school year is vitial… and that is just the teachers!"
Martin Burrett

What Should Schools Teach? 10 suggestions by @RichardJARogers - 23 views

  •  
    "I'm one of those few people who can actually say that I use the stuff I was taught in school on daily basis in my job. I'm a Science Teacher: so naturally, I'm teaching my students almost the same things I was taught at school. However, there are a lot of things I had to work out by myself when I left school. Was 'personal experience' the best way to learn these things?"
Randy Schultz

The False Promises of "School Choice" | Common Dreams - 22 views

  • State test results showed that students in private voucher schools performed significantly worse in math and about the same in reading as their public school counterparts.
  • or has Milwaukee’s voucher program met the promise of increased parental satisfaction. A longitudinal study on achievement, in its final report, noted that only17.5 percent of the voucher students remained in a voucher school after five years. The comparable figure for the public schools was 43.5 percent.
  • Vouchers are a vehicle to funnel tax dollars into private schools. Using the false promise of “choice,” they are an unabashed abandonment of public education and of our hopes for a vibrant democracy.
Clint Heitz

10 Things School Leaders Do to Kill a Teacher's Enthusiasm for Technology - 115 views

  • 9. Fail to provide training and additional resources needed for tech implementation. Training with an expert user is always a plus, even when using someone on staff as that expert. Even more important is providing time for the teacher to explore, experiment, and "play" with the technology. As far as resources, school leaders need to make sure teachers have all they need to implement new technologies: everything from powerbars to tables. Nothing can be more frustrating than having your greatest tech plans foiled by a lack of power outlets.
    • Clint Heitz
       
      Very true! Research has shown that the most successful technology interests are those that have proper support and professional development.
  • 5. Fail to provide adequate hardware and/or software.  I've seen so many examples of this over the years. Teachers are encouraged to get students writing and engaging in online blogging, but they don't have access to computers. Another example is even more ludicrous; students being asked to create 21st century projects yet they aren't given anything but 20th century tools such a colored pencils and construction paper. It is the school leader's responsibility to ensure teachers have adequate hardware and software for implementing technology.             
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    • Clint Heitz
       
      So difficult to be innovative and relevant when using outdated tools and materials that can't even support the tools we want to use.
  • While school districts are obligated under CIPA and common sense to provide some level of protection for young students, a filtering system is inadequate or faulty when it dictates what teachers can and can't do with the technology.
    • Clint Heitz
       
      This is especially difficult when only one person holds the key to the access. School leaders (i.e. principals) should be just as able to unblock access as the IT department.
  •  
    "10 Things School Leaders Do to Kill a Teacher's Enthusiasm for Technology" from Tech & Learning
Randolph Hollingsworth

NCES report: Students in 4 out of 5 high schools take college courses :: National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships (NACEP) - 0 views

  •  
    National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in U.S. DoE report on 2010-11 school year - estimated increase to 82% of all high schools offering college credit opportunities - most of which (77%) are offered on their high school campus in a "career center." A companion report on postsecondary providers of dual enrollment courses will be released in March. Full report available at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013001.pdf
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