The National Parks Service's Teaching with Historica Places uses places listed on the National Register of Historic Places to enhance traditional teaching of history, social studies, geography, etc. There are over 135 classroom lesson plans. I find this to be very interesting because I would like to incorporate more examples of material culture in the classroom. I think lessons like this provide a valuable lens through which to study historic moments.
Pretty cool pictures for various words....don't let students go on here alone though, as I've seen an explicit word or two (for example, look under letter "P").
Constructivist theories grew out of the work of a couple of Russians around the time of the Russian Revolution. It is radical subjectivism dressed up as science, and has no scientific credibility whatsoever. It is used by radical educators to push their barrow that nothing the teacher knows is worth the student learning and that all knowledge is innate. It's bullsh*t. Theories like this rot are part of the reason that the bottom has dropped out of Western education and we have a generation who can't write. This should be resisted by any educator with an interest in educational excellence.
As someone who has been going through hell all year because my sole evaluator has a chip on her shoulder, I can tell you that I love the idea of using master teachers as a complementary system of evaluation alongside administrators.
The article mentions that Charter Schools must outperform public schools. That's easy enough to do when you get to choose your students. There is no way to effectively compare and contrast student performance between public and charter schools because the deck is stacked so completely for the charters.
The world is filled with sluggish spectacles. Watching them would be painful were it not for time-lapse photography, which can make those long stories short and remarkably entertaining. When a