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Ms Davis

Virtual Nerd: Real help in math and science - 0 views

virtualnerd.com

math education science online learning

shared by Ms Davis on 28 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Ms Davis on 28 Sep 11
     
    A website that helps students with math and science. It shows tutorials and has helpful tips.
Ms Davis

APS RDA Math Performance Task Bank - 0 views

www.rda.aps.edu/...nsotasks.htm

math education performance task

shared by Ms Davis on 19 Oct 11 - Cached
  • Ms Davis on 19 Oct 11
     
    Math performance tasks
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.
  • 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

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.”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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?”
  • 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

Education Rethink: Ten Reasons to Get Rid of Homework (and Five Alternatives) - 7 views

www.educationrethink.com/...o-get-rid-of-homework-and.html

education homework learning

shared by jeffery heil on 21 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • 3. Inequitable Situation: I have some students who go home to parents that can provide additional support. I have others who go home and babysit younger siblings while their single parent works a second shift. I have some who don’t have adequate lighting, who constantly move and who lose electricity on a regular basis. Call those excuses if you want. I’ll call it systemic injustice instead.
  • 5. Homework Creates Adversarial Roles: It is possible for homework (or rather home learning) to be a positive force. However, when a parent is stuck as a practitioner of someone else’s pre-planned learning situation, it becomes an issue of management.
  • 6. Homework De-Motivates:
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  • 8. Most Homework Is Bad: Most homework recreates school within the confines of a home. So, instead of having children do interviews, analyze a neighborhood or engage in culinary math, the traditional approach involves packets.
Ms Davis

32 Interesting Ways to use an iPod Touch in the Classroom - 0 views

docs.google.com/...view

ipod apps technology classroom math

shared by Ms Davis on 26 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Ms Davis on 26 Oct 11
     
    Great slideshow for how to use IPod Touch. Some relate to iPads too!
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