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jeffery heil

9 New Skills You Need To be a 21st Century Educator | Online Universities - 0 views

www.onlineuniversities.com/...-to-be-a-21st-century-educator

21stcenturyskills 21stcentury 21centuryeducator jccs usdedu csusm education classroom

shared by jeffery heil on 06 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Blogging Teachers competent in WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and other free, popular blogging platforms have an excellent (and paperless!) tool at their disposal
  • Social media: Social media doesn’t have to worm its way into assignments to prove itself educationally valuable. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn burst with teachers and other academic professionals chattering about ideas, strategies, resources and tools.
  • Interclassroom communication: More and more, teachers turn to Skype, Cisco and other communication tools to connect with other schools worldwide. Why set up international pen pals when technology allows kids to interact almost literally face to face?
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  • Cultural literacy: Cultural literacy has always been a desired skill in teachers abroad and living in multiethnic domestic regions.
  • Socratic seminar:
  • Community engagement:
  • Information literacy: Seeing as how information literacy is considered integral to student success, schools have little use for teachers without the relevant skills.
  • Networking: A networking teacher is, ostensibly, an open teacher.
jeffery heil

We can't let educators off the hook | Dangerously Irrelevant - 0 views

dangerouslyirrelevant.org/...et-educators-off-the-hook.html

innovation technology teaching education 21centuryeducator educators

shared by jeffery heil on 07 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • I think most teachers don’t even realize that there’s a decision to be made. It’s not a matter of choosing the red pill or the blue pill… if you don’t know that there are even two pills available as options
  • Every day that I present for educators, I have a greater appreciate for how distorted the view is as seen through the eyes of a typical EduBlogger.
  • Rather, it's that their priorities don't always line up with those of other progressive educators in and out of the blogosphere.
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  • You can’t ‘firmly believe in life-long learning’ and simultaneously not be clued in to the largest transformation in learning that ever has occurred in human history. Those two don’t co-exist. Being a ‘life-long learner’ is not ignoring what’s going on around you; you don’t get to claim the title of ‘effective educator’ if you do this.
  • Changing inertia into momentum, not waiting for someone to hand us the answer, taking responsibility ourselves rather than blaming others for our own inactivity - that’s what life-long learners do. That’s what effective educators do. That’s what we owe our children.
  • t’s not about us. It’s not about our personal or professional priorities and preferences, our discomfort levels, or any of that other stuff that has to do with us. It’s about our students: our children and our youth who deserve at the end of their schooling experience to be prepared for the world in which they’re going to live and work and think and play and be. That’s the obligation of each and every one of us. No educator gets to disown this.
jeffery heil

Workers, soldiers or nomads - what does the Gates Foundation want from our ed... - 0 views

davecormier.com/...want-from-our-education-system

education learning teaching

shared by jeffery heil on 25 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • The why of education should be the first question that we answer in any discussion in the field.
  • Sadly, it seems to be very difficult to say anything about “what learning is” and “why we educate our children”.
  • but it’s pretty tough to create a system that both trains people to do what they are told and to also critically assess their culture.
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  • Memory is the representation of the things that we ‘know’ as a culture
  • The worker was the original goal of the public education system.
  • The worker needs to remember things without understanding them.
  • Learning for a worker is about compliance.
  • Our education system currently does a very good job of creating workers.
  • The soldier
  • They are the defenders of memory.
  • They are the ones who establish what things we currently know that the worker should remember, and then establish the system by which we will measure that knowing.
  • They decide which parts of the past will be valued
  • soldiers really can decide what they want to have valued.
  • Soldiers defend the status quo
  • The nomad is trying to do what I call ‘learning’.
  • Learning for the nomad is the point where the steps in a process go away.
  • It is what Wynton Marsalis calls ‘being the thing itself’
  • In order to create an educational system that allows for nomads we can’t measure for a prescribed outcome.
  • Rhizomatic learning
  • It is designed for a world where there aren’t ‘things people should know’ but rather ‘new connections to be made’.
  • If we want a society of innovators, of creatives, we can’t think of success as an act of compliance
Sherilyn Crawford

Gaston Caperton: Education and the 2012 Election - 1 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...and-the-2012-el_b_1076770.html

education teacher learning schools

shared by Sherilyn Crawford on 05 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Sherilyn Crawford on 05 Nov 11
     
    Article about education and the election, are our future leaders planning on reforming education?
jeffery heil

Why Are Finland's Schools Successful? | People & Places | Smithsonian Magazine - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...nlands-Schools-Successful.html

education finland schools learning

shared by jeffery heil on 09 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around.
  • “This is what we do every day, prepare kids for life.”
  • “Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education
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  • Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school.
  • more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia, among other nations
  • “We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test,”
  • There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions.
  • Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators.
  • The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.
  • “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”
  • Compulsory schooling does not begin until age 7. “We have no hurry,” said Louhivuori. “Children learn better when they are ready. Why stress them out?”
  • Ninety-seven percent of 6-year-olds attend public preschoo
  • Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Stu­dent health care is free.
  • The only time Rintola’s children are pulled out is for Finnish as a Second Language classes, taught by a teacher with 30 years’ experience and graduate school training.
  • English begins in third grade, Swedish in fourth.
  • Not until sixth grade will kids have the option to sit for a district-wide exam, and then only if the classroom teacher agrees to participate
  • Most do, out of curiosity. Results are not publicized. Finnish educators have a hard time understanding the United States’ fascination with standardized tests. “Americans like all these bars and graphs and colored charts,”
  • “Looks like we did better than average two years ago,” he said after he found the reports. “It’s nonsense. We know much more about the children than these tests can tell us.”
  • A class of first graders scampered among nearby pine and birch trees, each holding a stack of the teacher’s homemade laminated “outdoor math” cards. “Find a stick as big as your foot,” one read. “Gather 50 rocks and acorns and lay them out in groups of ten,” read another. Working in teams, the 7- and 8-year-olds raced to see how quickly they could carry out their tasks.
  • “We help situate them in the right high school,” said then deputy principal Anne Roselius. “We are interested in what will become of them in life.”
  • “It was simply the idea that every child would have a very good public school. If we want to be competitive, we need to educate everybody. It all came out of a need to survive.”
  • Teachers from all over the nation contributed to a national curriculum that provided guidelines, not prescriptions.
  • The second critical decision came in 1979, when reformers required that every teacher earn a fifth-year master’s degree in theory and practice at one of eight state universities—at state expense. From then on, teachers were effectively granted equal status with doctors and lawyers.
  • Applicants began flooding teaching programs, not because the salaries were so high but because autonomy and respect made the job attractive
  • All children—clever or less so—were to be taught in the same classrooms, with lots of special teacher help available to make sure no child really would be left behind
  • The inspectorate closed its doors in the early ’90s, turning accountability and inspection over to teachers and principals. “We have our own motivation to succeed because we love the work,” said Louhivuori. “Our incentives come from inside.”
  • A recent report by the Academy of Finland warned that some schools in the country’s large cities were becoming more skewed by race and class as affluent, white Finns choose schools with fewer poor, immigrant populations.
jeffery heil

The Missing Link in School Reform (August 16, 2011) | Stanford Social Innovation Review - 1 views

www.ssireview.org/..._missing_link_in_school_reform

edreform collaboration Education reform school socialcapital

shared by jeffery heil on 12 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • In Waiting for Superman
  • Three in 10 public school students fail to finish high school
  • Graduation rates for students in some minority groups are especially dismal, with just over half of Hispanics (55.5 percent) and African Americans (53.7 percent) graduating with their class.1
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  • only 26 percent of US high school students are proficient in math.
  • The accountability models increasingly in fashion find their roots in the discipline of economics rather than education, and they are exemplified in the value-added metrics now gathered by large urban school districts
  • Value-added modeling is one example of a larger approach to improving public schools that is aimed at enhancing what economists label “human capital”—factors such as teacher experience, subject knowledge, and pedagogical skills.
  • enhancing teacher human capital should not be the sole or even primary focus of school reform
  • if students are to show measurable and sustained improvement, schools must also foster what sociologists label “social capital”—the patterns of interactions among teachers.4
  • In addition to targeting teacher human capital, many believe that a key to improving public schools lies in bringing in people outside the school, or even the school district, to solve problems
  • A natural extension of the belief in the power of outsiders is the notion that teacher tenure is the enemy of effective public education.
  • In many reform efforts, the principal is cast as the “instructional leader” who is responsible for developing and managing pedagogical practice.
  • These three beliefs—in the power of teacher human capital, the value of outsiders, and the centrality of the principal in instructional practice—form the implicit or explicit core of many reform efforts today
  • Unfortunately, all three beliefs are rooted more in conventional wisdom and political sloganeering than in strong empirical research.
  • our findings strongly suggest that in trying to improve public schools we are overselling the role of human capital and innovation from the top, while greatly undervaluing the benefits of social capital and stability at the bottom.
  • results provide much support for the centrality of social capital—the relationships among teachers—for improving public schools.
  • teacher tenure can have significant positive effects on student achievement.
  • In the context of schools, human capital is a teacher’s cumulative abilities, knowledge, and skills developed through formal education and on-the-job experience.
  • several studies conducted largely by economists have shown little relationship between a teacher’s accumulation of formal education and actual student learning
  • Social capital, by comparison, is not a characteristic of the individual teacher but instead resides in the relationships among teachers.
  • A social capital perspective would answer the same question by looking not just at what a teacher knows, but also where she gets that knowledge
  • When a teacher needs information or advice about how to do her job more effectively, she goes to other teachers.
  • when the relationships among teachers in a school are characterized by high trust and frequent interaction—that is, when social capital is strong—student achievement scores improve.
  • Teachers were almost twice as likely to turn to their peers as to the experts designated by the school district, and four times more likely to seek advice from one another than from the principal.
  • We found that the students of high-ability teachers outperformed those of low-ability teachers, as proponents of human capital approaches to school improvement would predict.
  • Students whose teachers were more able (high human capital) and also had stronger ties with their peers (strong social capital) showed the highest gains in math achievement.
  • Conversely, students of teachers with lower teaching ability (low human capital) and weaker ties with their peers (weak social capital) showed the lowest achievement gains
  • even low-ability teachers can perform as well as teachers of average ability if they have strong social capital
  • According to Ms. Rhee, “cooperation, collaboration, and consensus building are way overrated.”7
  • When teacher turnover resulted in high losses of either human or social capital, student achievement declined. But when turnover resulted in high losses of both human and social capital, students were particularly disadvantaged.
  • ideology of school reform
  • But it is this latter class of activities—which can be conceived of as building external social capital—that made the difference both for teachers and for students.
  • When principals spent more time building external social capital, the quality of instruction in the school was higher and students’ scores on standardized tests in both reading and math were higher.
  • The more effective principals were those who defined their roles as facilitators of teacher success rather than instructional leaders.
  • the current focus on building teacher human capital—and the paper credentials often associated with it—will not yield the qualified teaching staff so desperately needed in urban districts.
  • olicymakers must also invest in measures that enhance collaboration and information sharing among teachers.
  • there is not enough emphasis on the value of teacher stability
  • We found direct, positive relationships between student achievement gains in mathematics and teacher tenure at grade level and teacher social capital.
  • principals who spent more of their time on collaborating with people and organizations outside the school delivered gains to teachers and students alike.
Sherilyn Crawford

Ravitch: Billionaires (and millionaires) for education reform - The Answer Sheet - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQAlDAHPN_blog.html

education learning edreform teaching

shared by Sherilyn Crawford on 15 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Sherilyn Crawford on 15 Nov 11
     
    Letter written by Diane Ravitch on what billionaires are doing to public education by funding vouchers and charter programs.
Sherilyn Crawford

Digging Deep into the Soil of Education « Mutterings and Musings of a Mere Mo... - 0 views

ehmanblog.wordpress.com/...eep-into-the-soil-of-education

education teacher learning schools

shared by Sherilyn Crawford on 31 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Sherilyn Crawford on 31 Oct 11
     
    Excellent blog post about trying to answer the question, "Why do we educate students?"
Sherilyn Crawford

LGBT groups withhold support from education bill | Washington Blade - America's Leading... - 0 views

www.washingtonblade.com/...ld-support-from-education-bill

education teacher learning schools edreform lgbt

shared by Sherilyn Crawford on 03 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Sherilyn Crawford on 03 Nov 11
     
    Talks about specific provisions to protect LGBT students in NCLB not being present in the new education bill and how eight LGBT groups are not giving their support for it
Sherilyn Crawford

An Education Violation | The Truth Pursuit - 0 views

thetruthpursuit.com/...10493

education teacher learning schools

shared by Sherilyn Crawford on 01 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Sherilyn Crawford on 01 Nov 11
     
    An interesting blog about teachers, cheating, and educational reform
jeffery heil

A Focus on Learning Rather Than Testing | FutureReady | The North Carolina New Schools ... - 0 views

newschoolsproject.org/...arning-rather-than-testing-150

learning testing focus schools Finland teaching

shared by jeffery heil on 05 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • One theme that has already emerged is the prevalence of trust that schools and their faculties will do what is in the best interest of students.
  • “We train the people and then leave it to them. The focus is on teacher professionalism. We talk about central steering, not central control.”
  • Key decisions, such as class size and textbook selection, are locally controlled.
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  • a national policy exists that requires schools to avoid ability grouping of students in what was described as preventing a “dead-end education for students.”
  • Teachers generally teach approximately 19 hours per week. The balance of their time is focused on working with their colleagues, reaching out to families and other duties
  • 96% of teachers are unionized
  • High levels of teacher education and preparation allow them to be more independent in the classroom.
  • Broad commitment to the vision of a knowledge-based society.
  • Educational equality
  • Education is free of charge to all, including books, meals, transportation and health care
  • “Our secret is investing in early intervention so that students don’t need it later.”
  • Sweden and Norway spend less on the front end and more later in remediation.
  • The principal works as a pedagogical director.
  • A culture of trust in which no school inspectors or national exams exist.
jeffery heil

Why Do Some People Learn Faster? | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views

www.wired.com/...-do-some-people-learn-faster-2

education learning Psychology articles

shared by jeffery heil on 05 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”
  • Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure.
  • Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes?
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  • Moser experiment is premised on the fact that there are two distinct reactions to mistake
  • The first reaction is called error-related negativity (ERN). It appears about 50 milliseconds after a screw-up and is believed to originate in the anterior cingulate cortex, a chunk of tissue that helps monitor behavior, anticipate rewards and regulate attention
  • second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe), arrives anywhere between 100-500 milliseconds after the mistake and is associated with awareness.
  • subjects learn more effectively when their brains demonstrate two properties: 1) a larger ERN signal, suggesting a bigger initial response to the mistake and 2) a more consistent Pe signal, which means that they are probably paying attention to the error, and thus trying to learn from it.
  • new paper, Moser et al. extends this research by looking at how beliefs about learning shape these mostly involuntary error-related signals in the brain,
  • scientists applied a dichotomy first proposed by Carol Dweck
  • Dweck distinguishes between people with a fixed mindset
  • and those with a growth mindset,
  • subjects with a growth mindset were significantly better at learning from their mistakes
  • those with a growth mindset generated a much larger Pe signal, indicating increased attention to their mistakes.
  • increased Pe signal was nicely correlated with improvement after error, implying that the extra awareness was paying dividends in performance.
  • When kids were praised for their effort, nearly 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles.
  • when kids were praised for their intelligence, most of them went for the easier test.
  • According to Dweck, praising kids for intelligence encourages them to “look” smart, which means that they shouldn’t risk making a mistake.
  • Students praised for their intelligence almost always chose to bolster their self-esteem by comparing themselves with students who had performed worse on the test. In contrast, kids praised for their hard work were more interested in the higher-scoring exams. They wanted to understand their mistakes, to learn from their errors, to figure out how to do better.
  • The experience of failure had been so discouraging for the “smart” kids that they actually regressed.
  • The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence — the “smart” compliment — is that it misrepresents the psychological reality of education
jeffery heil

3 Ways Disruptive Theory Can Change Education | Edudemic - 1 views

edudemic.com/...disruptive-theory

disruptive theory change education

shared by jeffery heil on 25 Feb 12 - No Cached
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