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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
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • results provide much support for the centrality of social capital—the relationships among teachers—for improving public schools.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • ideology of school reform
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
jeffery heil

SpeEdChange: If school isn't for collaborating, why does anyone come? - 0 views

speedchange.blogspot.com/...snt-for-collaborating-why.html

collaboration learning school education

shared by jeffery heil on 16 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • If students want to learn in isolation; if they want to sit at a desk and work on their own stuff, occasionally checking in with an "expert," they have no reason to come to school.
  • For years we've talked about (or we may have even been) kids who've only come to school because of team sports, or music groups, or theatre, or even hanging out at lunch.
  • If school isn't about doing things together, just about everyone has better places to spend their day.
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  • The world of work has moved on, but the educational structure, despite the efforts of many individual teachers and administrators, crawls along
  • Bill Gates favorite boy Salman Khan, believe that kids sitting alone, working by themselves, with canned, inflexible data in front of them, is the best preparation for life in the present and future.
  • So here is what your classroom, and your school, needs to offer kids:
  • 1. A learning environment in which students make most decisions.
  • 2. A time environment in which students learn and work along a schedule which makes sense to them
  • 3. A technological environment which supports collaboration across every barrier.
  • 4. A social environment where adults do not rank students according to their oppressive standards.
  • jeffery heil on 16 Oct 11
     
    If students want to learn in isolation; if they want to sit at a desk and work on their own stuff, occasionally checking in with an "expert," they have no reason to come to school. They can do a lot better at home, or at their local coffee shop or even the public library, where both the coffee and the WiFi connection will be better.
jeffery heil

Communities of practice - 0 views

www.ewenger.com/theory

wenger education theory cop collaboration communities_of_practice

shared by jeffery heil on 19 Aug 11 - Cached
  • Note that this definition allows for, but does not assume, intentionality: learning can be the reason the community comes together or an incidental outcome of member's interactions. Not everything called a community is a community of practice. A neighborhood for instance, is often called a community, but is usually not a community of practice
Sherilyn Crawford

5 Traits of the 21st Century Teacher - 0 views

www.mrkeenan.com/?p=864

education learning students 21stcenturylearning technology classroom

shared by Sherilyn Crawford on 13 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Driven to Learn
  • A Media Creation Expert
  • A Digital Navigator
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  • An Empathetic Mentor
  • A Technology Harmonizer
  • It is no longer acceptable to teach only from a textbook, to rely on the same worksheets an methods year after year without at least questioning them and researching why they are the best resource available.  
  •  Powerpoint and Word are becoming antiquated as newer and more powerful presentation and editing suites become available to teachers.
  • This means having social media accounts and understanding how they are used, even if you don’t use them specifically for learning.
  • This student-centered focus also creates learning opportunities for the teacher to learn with students, developing their teaching and collaborative skills
  • One of the keys here is that we work at making the technology work (in the best way we can) so the lesson becomes about the learning instead of the management of machines.
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