Group items tagged

  I’ve read, listen and thought  more about assessment than most and yet it still baffles me. Mostly because the kind of assessment that makes most sense (immediate and descriptive feedback) isn’t really valued in schools.

More and more, studies are showing how adept young people are at multitasking. But the extent to which they can deeply engage with the online material is a question for further research.

Dr. Hallett found that the teachers became so comfortable with him and his camera that they would freely insult their bosses during one-on-one interviews. But at the teachers’ formal group meetings, where they knew that another teacher might report their insults to the principal, they were more discreet.

they sometimes offered obliquely sarcastic comments to test the water

praise the predecessor

The teachers’ gossip never got as blatantly mean as the teenage girls’

The principal felt that her authority was being undermined by gossip and retaliated against teachers she suspected (correctly) of criticizing her.

in this case it was also a form of warfare that brought everyone down

it is more realistic to try managing it.

That simple question, a dare made in a pleasant voice

“Don’t we have some work to do here?”

he’s trying to shrink his audience back to the people who will pay for his content

Google allows Murdoch, or any publisher, to “opt out” of allowing its pages to be indexed?

he wants a closer relationship with Google.

6. Make several (unpleasant but necessary) assumptions.

7. Make your problem unique.

8. You ARE writing letters to a Stranger who has the power to resolve the problem

9. Write letters to the school as business letters.

10. NEVER make judgments.

11. Write your letter chronologically.

2. Write letters that are clear and easy to understand.

Before you write a letter, you need answer these questions.

2. Your First Letter is Always a Draft

3. Allow for "cooling off" and revision time.

An interesting side-note, when you said, …The model falls apart when we distribute content and extend the activities of the teacher to include multiple educator inputs and peer-driven learning. Simply: social and technological networks subvert the classroom-based role of the teacher. It came to mind that what’s really being subverted is not so much the classroom-based role as it is the teacher-controlled learning.

We’re still early in many of these trends. Many questions remain unanswered about privacy, ethics in networks, and assessment. My view is that change in education needs to be systemic and substantial. Education is concerned with content and conversations. The tools for controlling both content and conversation have shifted from the educator to the learner. We require a system that acknowledges this reality.

Taking “stack” just means keeping a list of people who wish to participate—offer a question or comment—during the Q & A. Rather than anxiously waving your hand around and wondering if you’ll be called on, if you would like to participate, signal to me in some way (a gesture, a dance move, a traditional hand-in-the-air, meaningful eye contact, etc.) and I will add you to the list. However, we’re not just going to take stack, we are going to take progressive stack in an effort to foreground voices that are typically silenced in dominant culture. According to Justine and Zoë, two self-identified transwomen who were active in the movement, progressive stack means that “if you self-identify as trans, queer, a person of color, female, or as a member of any marginalized group you’re given priority on the list of people who want to speak – the stack. The most oppressed get to speak first.” As I take stack, I will also do my best to bump marginalized voices and those who haven’t yet had a chance to participate to the top.

As with any tool that confronts the effects of privilege and power head-on, the Progressive Stack makes some people uncomfortable

In a complete social and historical vacuum, level-playing-field equality is an excellent proposition. But in the actual lived world of our history, experiences, and interactions the idea of treating everyone uniformly “regardless of gender” or without “seeing color” simply strengthens already-entrenched inequalities

As the increasing number of targeted online harassment campaigns has shown us, once a concept or issue has traveled through the right-wing Outrage-Distortion Complex, there is little hope of reclaiming rational discussion. It’s been permanently stained. One might dismiss the frothing lamentations of white-genocide-via-classroom-pedagogy that bubble up from a subreddit, but the insidious trope of “reverse racism” has put its thumb on the scale enough to have distorted the conversation around the Progressive Stack

because the Progressive Stack calls attention to existing structures of inequality by replacing them with another structure entirely, it forces those of us who identify as white (and, particularly, male) to confront the ways in which we have been complicit in maintaining inequality

When you’re accustomed to privilege, even the suggestion of equality will feel like oppression

google “progressive stack.” Almost every result you get will take you to the fever swamps of right-wing Reddit and warmed-over piles of gamergate droppings. The common denominator is that “Progressive Stack” is simply anti-white “racism” dressed in fancy intellectual clothes

Giving up power, it turns out, is hard for some people. Especially when that power has been historically-constructed to be so pervasive as to render it unquestioned and indeed unseen in its hegemonic sway. Pierre Bourdieu calls this symbolic power: “For symbolic power is that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it”

It means there will be times when people who are not accustomed to their identity being a source of discomfort and exclusion will have to learn–in a managed and intentional space–what that feels like.

there will be friction and messiness and uncomfortable adjustments, because any education worth the name involves friction and messiness and uncomfortable adjustments

I know my heart is in the right place on race, but I also know my heart is an irrelevant organ when it comes to traversing this minefield. I need instruction. 

what things used to be like is an irrelevance to these young women. What matters to them is the present — and their account of it is both important and distressing.

In the absence of any better ideas, all I think I can do for now is to listen to my students talking about their world, while continuing to talk to them about mine. I am educating them. And they are educating me.

Seattle teachers who went on strike in September included a call for more mental health supports for students as one of their bargaining points. The strike settlement included part-time social workers at most schools

“We’ve seen increases in anxiety, disordered eating, suicidal ideation, OCD and many other mental health challenges,”

Last school year, nearly 40 percent of schools nationally reported increases in physical attacks or fights, and roughly 60 percent reported more disruptions in class because of student misconduct, according to federal data.

“School-based health centers fill a void, particularly in low-income communities,” said Robert Boyd, chief executive at the nonprofit School-Based Health Alliance. “In rural communities, sometimes it’s the only provider around.”

school systems are expanding social-emotional learning intended to help students understand and regulate their emotions, develop positive relationships and face challenges. These lessons may be embedded in classes (say, a discussion of empathy related to characters in a novel) or they may come directly through an activity about, for instance, decision-making. In some parts of the country, social-emotional teachings are tangled up in the culture wars, particularly when material deals with gender and racial equity.

Critics see the excused days off as counterproductive for students who have already missed too much school, but supporters say the laws recognize the stressful reality of many students’ lives and elevate the stature of mental health so that it is comparable to physical health.