Skip to main content

Home/ eme5050/ Group items tagged Larry Cuban

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Victoria Ahmetaj

From Labs to Laptops to Carts at Las Montanas: A Story of Principals at Work | Larry Cu... - 0 views

larrycuban.wordpress.com/...-a-story-of-principals-at-work

Larry Cuban teaching classroom education education reform professionaldevelopment

shared by Victoria Ahmetaj on 01 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • From Labs to Laptops to Carts at Las Montanas: A Story of Principals at Work
  • Victoria Ahmetaj on 01 Feb 14
     
    Larry Cuban's blog on Las Montanas High School- Laptops in the classroom
Victoria Ahmetaj

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice | Just another WordPress.com weblog - 0 views

larrycuban.wordpress.com

teaching classroom Larry Cuban education reform education reform professionaldevelopment

shared by Victoria Ahmetaj on 01 Feb 14 - Cached
  • He pointed out to me how similar teachers experiencing failures with students is to physicians erring in diagnoses or treatments (or both) of their patients.
  • In the other book, surgeon Atul Gawande described how he almost lost an Emergency Room patient who had crashed her car when he fumbled a tracheotomy only for patient to be saved by another surgeon who successfully got the breathing tube inserted. Gawande also has a chapter on doctors’ errors. His point, documented by a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine (1991) and subsequent reports  is that nearly all physicians err. If nearly all doctors make mistakes, do they talk about them? Privately  with people they trust, yes. In public, that is, with other doctors in academic hospitals, the answer is also yes. There is an institutional mechanism where hospital doctors meet weekly called Morbidity and Mortality Conferences (M & M for short) where, in Gawande’s words, doctors “gather behind closed doors to review the mistakes, untoward events, and deaths that occurred on their watch, determine responsibility, and figure out what to do differently (p. 58).” He describes an M & M (pp.58-64) at his hospital and concludes: “The M & M sees avoiding error as largely a matter of will–staying sufficiently informed and alert to anticipate the myriad ways that things can go wrong and then trying to head off each potential problem before it happens” (p. 62). Protected by law, physicians air their mistakes without fear of malpractice suits.
  • Nothing like that for teachers in U.S. schools. Sure, privately, teachers tell one another how they goofed with a student, misfired on a lesson, realized that they had provided the wrong information, or fumbled the teaching of a concept in a class. Of course,  there are scattered, well-crafted professional learning communities in elementary and secondary schools where teachers feel it is OK to admit they make mistakes and not fear retaliation. They can admit error and learn to do better the next time. In the vast majority of schools, however, no analogous M & M exists (at least as far as I know).
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • substantial differences between doctors and teachers. For physicians, the consequences of their mistakes might be lethal or life-threatening. Not so, in most instances, for teachers. But also consider other differences:
  • From teachers to psychotherapists to doctors to social workers to nurses, these professionals use their expertise to transform minds, develop skills, deepen insights, cope with feelings and mend bodily ills. In doing so, these helping professions share similar predicaments.
  • *Doctors see patients one-on-one; teachers teach groups of 20 to 35 students four to five hours a day.
  • While these differences are substantial in challenging comparisons, there are basic commonalities that bind teachers to physicians. First, both are helping professions that seek human improvement. Second, like practitioners in other sciences and crafts, both make mistakes. These commonalities make comparisons credible even with so many differences between the occupations.
  • *Most U.S. doctors get paid on a fee-for-service basis; nearly all full-time public school teachers are salaried.
  • *Expertise is never enough. For surgeons, cutting out a tumor from the colon will not rid the body of cancer; successive treatments of chemotherapy are necessary and even then, the cancer may return. Some high school teachers of science with advanced degrees in biology, chemistry, and physics believe that lessons should be inquiry driven and filled with hands-on experiences while other colleagues, also with advanced degrees, differ. They argue that naïve and uninformed students must absorb the basic principles of biology, chemistry, and physics through rigorous study before they do any “real world” work in class.
  • For K-12 teachers who face captive audiences among whom are some students unwilling to participate in lessons or who defy the teacher’s authority or are uncommitted to learning what the teacher is teaching, then teachers have to figure out what to do in the face of students’ passivity or active resistance.
  • Both doctors and teachers, from time to time, err in what they do with patients and students. Patients can bring malpractice suits to get damages for errors. But that occurs sometimes years after the mistake. What hospital-based physicians do have, however, is an institutionalized way of learning (Mortality and Morbidity conferences) from their mistakes so that they do not occur again. So far, among teachers there are no public ways of admitting mistakes and learning from them (privately, amid trusted colleagues, such admissions occur). For teachers, admitting error publicly can lead directly to job loss). So while doctors, nurses, and other medical staff have M & M conferences to correct mistakes, most teachers lack such collaborative and public ways of correcting mistakes (one exception might be in special education where various staff come together weekly or monthly to go over individual students’ progress).
  • Victoria Ahmetaj on 01 Feb 14
     
    Teacher vs. Doctor
1 - 2 of 2
Showing 20▼ items per page