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Tony Richards

The Atlantic Online | January/February 2010 | What Makes a Great Teacher? | Amanda Ripley - 14 views

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    "What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo
Vicki Davis

New standardized tests feature plugs for commercial products - 5 views

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    Disgusting. Via the Washington Post So many things going wrong. "Talk about corporate-based school reform. New high-stakes standardized tests aligned with the Common Core State Standards are featuring plugs for commercial products. And the companies didn't have to pay a penny. Yes, New York state students who this past week took Pearson-designed exams were just treated to plugs for LEGO, Mug Root Beer and more products from at least half a dozen companies, according to  the New York Post."
Vicki Davis

Epic learning: Common Core enters World of Warcraft - index - 4 views

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    Peggy Sheehy is the matron of gamification and she's one upped her own groundbreaking work in Second Life. She's gamified the Common Core Learning Standards. Wow. One more reason you can't use standards as an excuse to do nothing. "They are also learning to be mighty gamers because Sheehy is gamifying the Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS). With the command "Go forth and be epic," students pack away drafts and log on to 3D Game Lab where A Hero's Journey awaits. WoWinSchool: A Hero's Journey is a curriculum based in World of Warcraft (WoW), a massively multiplayer online role-playing game in which players assume characters and interact within an ever-changing, virtual world.  Sheehy helped to frame the curriculum developed by Lucas Gillespie and Craig Lawson with whom she collaborates on the award-winning WoWInSchool project.  "
Jeff Johnson

Report Cards Give Up A's and B's for 4s and 3s (NYTimes.com) - 0 views

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    They are called standards-based report cards, part of a new system flourishing around the country as the latest frontier in a 20-year push to establish rigorous academic standards and require state tests on the material.
darkbird18 Wharry

____Star DMOZ.org _Open Dir Project.URL - 0 views

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    The Open Directory is the most widely distributed data base of Web content classified by humans. Its editorial standards body of net-citizens provide the collective brain behind resource discovery on the Web. The Open Directory powers the core directory services for the Web's largest and most popular search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit, and hundreds of others.
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    The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. The Open Directory is the most widely distributed data base of Web content classified by humans. Its editorial standards body of net-citizens provide the collective brain behind resource discovery on the Web. The Open Directory powers the core directory services for the Web's largest and most popular search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit, and hundreds of others.
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    The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. The Open Directory is the most widely distributed data base of Web content classified by humans. Its editorial standards body of net-citizens provide the collective brain behind resource discovery on the Web. The Open Directory powers the core directory services for the Web's largest and most popular search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit, and hundreds of others.
Vicki Davis

Common Core Academies | Digital textbooks and standards-aligned educational resources - 7 views

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    Through the end of the year, Discovery just sent me a note that they are offering these three common core academies at no cost. Here's the info from Steve Dembo. I've done some work with their SIEMENS STEM Academy and am a sTAR Educator and everything they do is top notch. If you can work it out before the end of the year, this is something you'll want to do. From Steve Dembo: "We know that implementing the Common Core can be an uphill climb. That's why Discovery Education is proud to partner with educators to offer Common Core Academies in ELA, Math, and Leadership at no cost. From now until the end of the school year, educators across America are invited to sign up for an Academy and receive: practical strategies to implement CCSS reseach-based instructional practices best practices in using digital content resources and digital tools for immediate classroom integration Discovery Education Common Core Academies offer one day of immersive professional development and two follow-up virtual sessions at no cost to support educators and leaders in effectively implementing the Common Core State Standards. Educators may choose from three Academies offering a unique combination that brings together best practices in digital integration with proven research-based instructional practices: Literacy and the Common Core in a Digital World Teaching and Assessing Common Core Math in a Digital World Leadership Strategies to Support Digital Literacy and the Common Core"
Julie Shy

Gooru - 10 views

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    Gooru is a free platform for students and teachers to access standards-based online resources in organized "playlists" for learning. Created by a Google employee, it's run by a nonprofit group called Ednovo. Students can access "ClassBooks"-collections of textbooks, videos, and assessments-on any topic, and they can interact with their peers and teachers while studying. Teachers can search for standards-aligned web resources organized into "ClassPlans," which they can customize and share with the larger community. In short, educators can use the site to search and teach, while students can use it to search and study; the website's tagline is "learning is social."
Adrienne Michetti

Why Women Still Can't Have It All - www.theatlantic.com - Readability - 7 views

  • Just about all of the women in that room planned to combine careers and family in some way. But almost all assumed and accepted that they would have to make compromises that the men in their lives were far less likely to have to make.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      and this is what bothers me. SO MUCH.
  • when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating “you can have it all” is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.
  • I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and that men can too). I believe that we can “have it all at the same time.” But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured. My experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—and quickly changed.
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  • I had the ability to set my own schedule most of the time. I could be with my kids when I needed to be, and still get the work done.
  • the minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be
  • having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had.
  • having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long.
  • “Having control over your schedule is the only way that women who want to have a career and a family can make it work.”
  • Yet the decision to step down from a position of power—to value family over professional advancement, even for a time—is directly at odds with the prevailing social pressures on career professionals in the United States.
  • “leaving to spend time with your family” is a euphemism for being fired.
  • Think about what this “standard Washington excuse” implies: it is so unthinkable that an official would actually step down to spend time with his or her family that this must be a cover for something else.
  • it cannot change unless top women speak out.
  • Both were very clear that they did not want that life, but could not figure out how to combine professional success and satisfaction with a real commitment to family.
  • many of us are also reinforcing a falsehood: that “having it all” is, more than anything, a function of personal determination.
  • there has been very little honest discussion among women of our age about the real barriers and flaws that still exist in the system despite the opportunities we inherited.
  • But we have choices about the type and tempo of the work we do. We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks.
  • women are less happy today than their predecessors were in 1972, both in absolute terms and relative to men.
  • The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap:
  • Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.
  • We must clear them out of the way to make room for a more honest and productive discussion about real solutions to the problems faced by professional women.
  • These women cannot possibly be the standard against which even very talented professional women should measure themselves. Such a standard sets up most women for a sense of failure
  • A simple measure is how many women in top positions have children compared with their male colleagues.
  • Every male Supreme Court justice has a family. Two of the three female justices are single with no children.
  • women hold fewer than 30 percent of the senior foreign-policy positions in each of these institutions.
  • “You know what would help the vast majority of women with work/family balance? MAKE SCHOOL SCHEDULES MATCH WORK SCHEDULES.” The present system, she noted, is based on a society that no longer exists—one in which farming was a major occupation and stay-at-home moms were the norm. Yet the system hasn’t changed.
  • “Inflexible schedules, unrelenting travel, and constant pressure to be in the office are common features of these jobs.”
  • I would hope to see commencement speeches that finger America’s social and business policies, rather than women’s level of ambition, in explaining the dearth of women at the top. But changing these policies requires much more than speeches. It means fighting the mundane battles—every day, every year—in individual workplaces, in legislatures, and in the media.
  • assumes that most women will feel as comfortable as men do about being away from their children, as long as their partner is home with them. In my experience, that is simply not the case.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      This is fascinating. Really. 
  • I do not believe fathers love their children any less than mothers do, but men do seem more likely to choose their job at a cost to their family, while women seem more likely to choose their family at a cost to their job.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      This. This is SO TRUE. I think this is the same.
  • To many men, however, the choice to spend more time with their children, instead of working long hours on issues that affect many lives, seems selfish.
  • It is not clear to me that this ethical framework makes sense for society. Why should we want leaders who fall short on personal responsibilities?
  • Regardless, it is clear which set of choices society values more today. Workers who put their careers first are typically rewarded; workers who choose their families are overlooked, disbelieved, or accused of unprofessionalism.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      This disconnect has ALWAYS bothered me. SO MUCH.
  • having a supportive mate may well be a necessary condition if women are to have it all, but it is not sufficient
  • Ultimately, it is society that must change, coming to value choices to put family ahead of work just as much as those to put work ahead of family. If we really valued those choices, we would value the people who make them; if we valued the people who make them, we would do everything possible to hire and retain them; if we did everything possible to allow them to combine work and family equally over time, then the choices would get a lot easier.
  • Given the way our work culture is oriented today, I recommend establishing yourself in your career first but still trying to have kids before you are 35—or else freeze your eggs, whether you are married or not.
  • But the truth is, neither sequence is optimal, and both involve trade-offs that men do not have to make.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      exactly this -- men do not have to make this choice. Thus, it will always be unequal.
  • You should be able to have a family if you want one—however and whenever your life circumstances allow—and still have the career you desire.
  • If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions. And if more women were in leadership positions, they could make it easier for more women to stay in the workforce. The rest of this essay details how.
  • I have to admit that my assumption that I would stay late made me much less efficient over the course of the day than I might have been, and certainly less so than some of my colleagues, who managed to get the same amount of work done and go home at a decent hour.
  • Still, armed with e-mail, instant messaging, phones, and videoconferencing technology, we should be able to move to a culture where the office is a base of operations more than the required locus of work.
  • Being able to work from home—in the evening after children are put to bed, or during their sick days or snow days, and at least some of the time on weekends—can be the key, for mothers, to carrying your full load versus letting a team down at crucial moments.
  • Changes in default office rules should not advantage parents over other workers; indeed, done right, they can improve relations among co-workers by raising their awareness of each other’s circumstances and instilling a sense of fairness.
  • The policy was shaped by the belief that giving women “special treatment” can “backfire if the broader norms shaping the behavior of all employees do not change.”
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      This is so progressive.
  • Our assumptions are just that: things we believe that are not necessarily so. Yet what we assume has an enormous impact on our perceptions and responses. Fortunately, changing our assumptions is up to us.
  • One of the best ways to move social norms in this direction is to choose and celebrate different role models.
  • If we didn’t start to learn how to integrate our personal, social, and professional lives, we were about five years away from morphing into the angry woman on the other side of a mahogany desk who questions her staff’s work ethic after standard 12-hour workdays, before heading home to eat moo shoo pork in her lonely apartment.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      UGH.
  • Women have contributed to the fetish of the one-dimensional life, albeit by necessity. The pioneer generation of feminists walled off their personal lives from their professional personas to ensure that they could never be discriminated against for a lack of commitment to their work.
  • It seems odd to me to list degrees, awards, positions, and interests and not include the dimension of my life that is most important to me—and takes an enormous amount of my time.
  • when my entire purpose is to make family references routine and normal in professional life.
  • This does not mean that you should insist that your colleagues spend time cooing over pictures of your baby or listening to the prodigious accomplishments of your kindergartner. It does mean that if you are late coming in one week, because it is your turn to drive the kids to school, that you be honest about what you are doing.
  • Seeking out a more balanced life is not a women’s issue; balance would be better for us all.
  • Indeed, the most frequent reaction I get in putting forth these ideas is that when the choice is whether to hire a man who will work whenever and wherever needed, or a woman who needs more flexibility, choosing the man will add more value to the company.
  • In 2011, a study on flexibility in the workplace by Ellen Galinsky, Kelly Sakai, and Tyler Wigton of the Families and Work Institute showed that increased flexibility correlates positively with job engagement, job satisfaction, employee retention, and employee health.
  • Other scholars have concluded that good family policies attract better talent, which in turn raises productivity, but that the policies themselves have no impact on productivity.
  • What is evident, however, is that many firms that recruit and train well-educated professional women are aware that when a woman leaves because of bad work-family balance, they are losing the money and time they invested in her.
  • The answer—already being deployed in different corners of the industry—is a combination of alternative fee structures, virtual firms, women-owned firms, and the outsourcing of discrete legal jobs to other jurisdictions.
  • Women, and Generation X and Y lawyers more generally, are pushing for these changes on the supply side; clients determined to reduce legal fees and increase flexible service are pulling on the demand side. Slowly, change is happening.
  • In trying to address these issues, some firms are finding out that women’s ways of working may just be better ways of working, for employees and clients alike.
  • “We believe that connecting play and imagination may be the single most important step in unleashing the new culture of learning.”
  • “Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” Google apparently has taken note.
  • the more often people with different perspectives come together, the more likely creative ideas are to emerge. Giving workers the ability to integrate their non-work lives with their work—whether they spend that time mothering or marathoning—will open the door to a much wider range of influences and ideas.
  • Men have, of course, become much more involved parents over the past couple of decades, and that, too, suggests broad support for big changes in the way we balance work and family.
  • women would do well to frame work-family balance in terms of the broader social and economic issues that affect both women and men.
  • These women are extraordinary role models.
  • Yet I also want a world in which, in Lisa Jackson’s words, “to be a strong woman, you don’t have to give up on the things that define you as a woman.”
  • “Empowering yourself,” Jackson said in her speech at Princeton, “doesn’t have to mean rejecting motherhood, or eliminating the nurturing or feminine aspects of who you are.”
  • But now is the time to revisit the assumption that women must rush to adapt to the “man’s world” that our mothers and mentors warned us about.
  • If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal.
  • We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too. We have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many men standing beside us.
  • But when we do, we will stop talking about whether women can have it all.
Vicki Davis

OpenEd - 6 views

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    While most teachers will not understand what this means, an API is something that lets other websites interact with a main website. OpenEd has released an API to allow others to interact with their resources and find things based on standards or keywords. What this means is that OpenEd is going to be a very useful tool for all of education in the future because of this technological tool. It also means that if you're developing for a state or for an organization that provides educational resources, you should tap into this for a huge repository of almost a quarter of a million standards aligned resources that your teachers can search. This is great news.
Fred Delventhal

TRAILS: Tool for Real-time Assessment of Information Literacy Skills - 0 views

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    TRAILS is a knowledge assessment with multiple-choice questions targeting a variety of information literacy skills based on sixth and ninth grade standards. This Web-based system was developed to provide an easily accessible and flexible tool for library media specialists and teachers to identify strengths and weaknesses in the information-seeking skills of their students.
Adrienne Michetti

AJET 19(1) Boyle (2003) - design principles for authoring dynamic, reusable learning ob... - 1 views

  • delineate a coherent framework for the authoring of re-purposable learning objects
  • significant changes in the creation of learning objects
  • nternational work directed at developing learning object standards
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  • a learning object is defined as any entity, digital or non-digital, that may be used for learning, education or training. IEEE
  • ork on metadata and learning object packaging
  • cohesion
  • ke any learning object and provide a 'wrapper' around this object
  • learning object is thus 'packaged' in a standard container format
  • learning objects must be developed with potential reuse, and especially repurposing in mind. The principal aim of this paper is to explore and delineate principles underlying authoring for reuse and repurposing.
  • taxonomy
  • This mapping suggests that each learning object should be based on one learning objective or clear learning goal.
  • The principle of cohesion, however, indicates that there should be a separate learning object for each type of loop. An immediate advantage is that the tutor can select the order in which these learning objects are combined. A tutor dealing with experienced student may wish to deal with these in sequence; another tutor with a different group of students may intersperse these learning objects with object dealing with other features of the language.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      This would, then, make them easier to edit and manipulate in the future. I can follow this article.
  • the principle of 'de-coupling', or more accurately minimised coupling.
  • unit (software module/learning object) should have minimal bindings to other units.
  • independently of the other (
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      Right - and the goal is complete independence so as to be able to manipulate and change later.
  • The learning object should, as far as possible, be free standing.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      YES! Can we please apply this to items as simple as Word documents and HTML? It would make things so much easier. This also reminds me of good pedagogical design principles BEFORE we had digital learning -- the same should be true for worksheets, handouts, textbooks, etc. It needs to be able to be changed.
  • adaptation
  • The challenge is to maintain this richness in a system composed of reusable components.
  • We must face the challenge of creating learning objects that are cohesive, decoupled and pedagogically rich. This design challenge is associated with the issue of 'repurposability' as we might expect rich learning objects to provide further options for adaptation by local tutors.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      Yes, yes, and yes. We need to think beyond our own immediate purposes.
  • n the Java language
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      quite honestly, I would have preferred a non-computer programming example. These principles apply to all technology design, not just programming. Something more accessible would have made this paper stronger.
  • The project involves intervention in syllabus development, the social organisation of learning and the introduction of new eLearning materials. The eLearning resources are being based on the authoring of rich, reusable learning objects. This development provides the focus for the present discussion.
  • The learning objects are being developed both to meet immediate pedagogical needs and to serve this larger goal. This produces extra pressure initially. However, it provides the potential to divide the eventual task among a number of contributing partners, exploiting considerable advantages of scale.
  • A key challenge for the project is to resolve the tensions in a creative and productive way.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      Basically, you have to take it all apart and put it back together again. This is fundamental to learning a new way to design anything, really.
  • A compound object consists of two or more independent learning objects that are linked to create the compound.
  • A further important feature is that each simple component object can be reused independently.
  • They thus provide a basis for pedagogical richness that fully exploits the opportunities offered by the technology.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      YES! use the tech to its best.
  • manage the bindings between one object and others
  • they should be able to reconfigure this to shape their own compound object.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      This is so crucial. Each educator must be able to restructure it, use to his/her advantage within context.
  • main types of binding: navigational bindings through URLs and non-URL based content bindings. This design pattern deals with the issue of URL based bindings.
  • we must have a design mechanism for managing these bindings.
  • learning object consists of a core and zero or more expansions. A default object is presented with the core with certain expansions added. These expansions aim to provide added pedagogical value to help in attaining the learning objective.
  • the relationship between learning objects and the syllabus, course or other higher organising structure in which they are delivered.
  • the syllabus navigation structure operates at a different layer of organisation for the learning object resources
  • . These syllabi objects operate at a different layer from that of main content objects
  • The key message is the need to establish distinct layers of organisation in eLearning
  • The central challenge is to design for reuse and repurposing.
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    painful reading with the example of Java - but the point remains that all learning objects should be managed and designed with the purpose of being able to use them in the future in ways that are dynamic and reusable. This means de-coupling them and ensuring they are made of distinct pedagogical units.
Vicki Davis

Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading International Dyslexia Associa... - 1 views

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    This guide is from Dr. Louisa C. Moats and the International Dyslexia Association. It bridges research into practice to create a "research-based tool for practitioners." These are the standards used by the IDI to guide teachers of reading, spelling, and writing.
Vicki Davis

KC3 - Kids Creating Community Content - Home - 5 views

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    An interesting project. "Circling the globe from east to west, urban or rural, we each live in a unique community. What can we learn from our area, from our varied citizens or natural resources? This standards based project seeks to tap into the creative nature of students as they look at their community with new eyes and explore ways to share their findings with others using videoconferencing and technology as a resource."
Vicki Davis

The real problem in education: the 'opportunity gap' - 4 views

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    "But even by reasonable standards, the nation's educational outcomes are not in much better shape than they were in 1983. Whether we're looking at overall scores or at achievement gaps, the trend lines for NAEP, the so-called Nation's Report Card, generally show a post-reform picture that looks pretty much like the pre-reform picture - with positive trend lines but apparent slowing after 1990. There is no way to tease those data into showing that test-based accountability reform is accomplishing its key learning goals."
Megan Black

Educurious - 12 views

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    Educurious™ is on a mission to reduce our nation's high school dropout rates. Our project-based curriculum connects students to real issues they care about and equips them with the lifelong learning skills for success. Our courses deliver on Common Core Standards via our web platform, which fosters collaboration among students, teachers and our global network of real-world Experts.
Brett Campbell

Updated teacher observations are key to improvement, report says - Los Angeles Times - 7 views

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    "The old-fashioned practice of rating instructors by watching them teach is tricky, labor-intensive, potentially costly and subjective - but perhaps the best way to help them improve, according to a study released Friday by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation... "And the observers, typically the school principal, frequently don't know what to look for anyway. "The best way to evaluate teachers, while also helping them improve, is to use several measures - including data-based methods that rely on students' standardized test scores, along with an updated teacher observation system, the report found.
Vicki Davis

Lesson Plans - ReadWriteThink - 3 views

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    Language arts teachers of all ages will love the free lesson plans on this website. They are standards based and organized by grade level.
Cara Whitehead

Early Elementary Science Curriculum - K-2 Interactive Science Program - 15 views

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    Online, interactive, standards-based science curriculum www.science4us.com
Jeff Johnson

Framework for Teaching | Danielson Group - 0 views

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    The Framework for Teaching is a research-based set of components of instruction, aligned to the INTASC standards, and grounded in a constructivist view of learning and teaching. In this framework, the complex activity of teaching is divided into 22 components (and 76 smaller elements) clustered into four domains of teaching responsibility: planning and preparation (Domain 1), classroom environment (Domain 2), instruction (Domain 3), and professional responsibilities (Domain 4).
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