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Kids were disrespectful to teachers, and teachers were impatient with kids

how does a school get to the point that my school was at when I first arrived? In this particular case, there had been a series of administrative turnovers, so every couple of years the priorities changed. There was no adopted discipline code, so school discipline was something that was randomly applied to individual students rather than a part of the entire school culture. Teachers felt that they were not supported by administration, and some students realized that there were few in any consequences for poor behavior (the student who hit the opposing player earned the first suspension in years). Some teachers just gave up; others became angry. Still others were intimidated. Teacher absenteeism was high.

The school turnaround didn’t occur overnight, but at the end of two years of consistent application of the discipline plan

Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing. Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.

one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake. Students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act.

Mr. Taylor follows a very basic lesson plan often referred to by educators as “I do, we do, you do.” He does a problem on the board. Then the whole class does another one the same way. Then all the kids do a problem on their own.

I branded myself to have an online identity of which I’m proud. This is an important skill to teach students. Equally important is conveying the idea that being safe and responsible online does not mean hiding your identity but rather defining it and owning it.

continuous reflection throughout the process

(1) modeling the use of new technologies in communicating to students, teachers and the general public; (2) ensuring that technology becomes integral to teaching 21st-century skills from critical thinking and problem solving to collaboration and information literacy in the classroom; (3) boosting Web 2.0 applications and tools as key components of student learning; (4) offering professional development in these technologies and deploying the online tools that help teachers create learning communities among themselves; and (5) requiring better balanced assessments of student work—including project-based learning enhanced by technology tools—in an age driven by NCLB-oriented testing and better use of data from the assessments to help students improve their performance.

The revised edition also includes a self-assessment for superintendents to evaluate how far their districts have come along the technological curve. CoSN’s CEO Keith Krueger explains that his organization’s research shows that many district leaders are behind that curve, and the new document opens with a letter:

e cautions that the large-scale changes CoSN is advocating are most likely to happen for district leaders who are not engaged in dozens of other initiatives. “Everybody wants the superintendent to be in the middle of everything,” Reeves explains. “The real acid test is whether you can execute the ‘not-to-do list,’” adding that superintendents need to resist establishing too many priorities. Each of the five areas featured in “Empowering the 21st Century Superintendent” includes a set of resources and a series of action steps for superintendents and district leadership teams. For instance, in the 21st-century skills section, leaders are urged to improve their own such skills, create a vision for integrating them into K12 instruction, audit the district’s strategic plan to see which might be missing and adjust professional development accordingly.

From early on he began to invite many of my classmates on various trips.

They never forced me to do anything, though, because they respected and cared about my father.They knew where he stood on many issues because he’d talk to them about it.

he knew I would have this problem and knew he would have to build up a support system.

The carefully selected press clippings and resources in this section have been chosen to provide a clear sense of both the forest and the trees in the landscape of emerging technology. Included are not only information about the technologies themselves but also clues to the context within which they are developed and used.

Guy Kawasaki’s post on how he chose a Facebook page

there may be levels of web learning maturation at work here: Childhood: people who are very new to using the web for learning tend to accept what is given to them, because they don’t really know what the options are. When online learning with the LMS was new, most people were in this category. Adulthood: people who use the web a great deal and in varied ways tend to do better in online classes, and assess the worth of the LMS (or any tool) based on how well it works for the course. Adolescence: in between are the adolescents. They know just enough to be dangerous. They have enough experience to want convenience and not enough to understand the larger issues of pedagogy, including the restrictiveness of an LMS on what the instructor wants to do. They can drive but have no sense of how traffic works.

Why it’s important to deal now with the “teen angst” of web-adolescence: 1. Not customizing the LMS to suit your pedagogy implies that we all teach the same way. If we all teach the same way, then a computer can do our work instead. (I’ve been reading Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind – he’s pretty clear that if a computer can do your job, eventually it will.) 2. Instructors should use the tools that best create the environment they want, and that increasingly means web applications that require multiple log-ins. Students should get accustomed to using separate tools for separate tasks, just like in the real world. 3. Acknowledging the teen view means taking it seriously, but it doesn’t mean developing policy around it. Just as parents try to mitigate the excesses of the teen diet and habits, we owe students our wisdom in creating the learning experience that is most appropriate. (Oh dear, I’m starting to sound like Edmund Burke again.)

It is a factor outside of education that Moe believes is the real game-changer: the rapid expansion of information technology. Moe believes, as he and John Chubb argued recently in their 2009 book, Liberating Learning, that technology has the power to weaken the unions by fundamentally changing the way that schools operate. Schools are heavily dependent on human capital—that is, teachers. Technology is beginning to enter classrooms and perform some, though not all, of the tasks for which teachers have always been required. Interactive software can not only supplement, but eventually replace, a portion of teacher-based instruction. Over time, technology could make it so that schools require fewer teachers and thus fewer union members. Moe makes a bold prediction that someday soon, this is going to happen.

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