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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

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
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • 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

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

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.
Sherilyn Crawford

Defender News - Bryan Station High School - No Child Left Behind has overstayed welcome - 0 views

my.hsj.org/...nd_has_overstayed_welcome.aspx

education teacher learning schools edreform nclb

shared by Sherilyn Crawford on 27 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Sherilyn Crawford on 27 Oct 11
     
    Another article on EdReform by a high school student. Talks about NCLB.
Sherilyn Crawford

The Mallet - Proctor Senior High School - Measuring what matters least - 0 views

my.hsj.org/...suring_what_matters_least.aspx

education teacher learning measuring testing school

shared by Sherilyn Crawford on 26 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Sherilyn Crawford on 26 Oct 11
     
    An article written by a high school about the negative effects of standardized testing.
Sherilyn Crawford

MinnPost - Carol Johnson's three big lessons on school reform - 1 views

www.minnpost.com/...e_big_lessons_on_school_reform

education learning edreform teaching

shared by Sherilyn Crawford on 12 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Sherilyn Crawford on 12 Nov 11
     
    Great article on three issues with school reform
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

Coaching a Surgeon: What Makes Top Performers Better? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...111003fa_fact_gawande

coaching education learning teachers pedagogy teaching

shared by jeffery heil on 10 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • For my specialized cases, I’ve come to know most of the serious difficulties that could arise, and have worked out solution
  • For the others, I’ve gained confidence in my ability to handle a wide range of situations, and to improvise when necessary.
  • What we think of as coaching was, sports historians say, a distinctly American development
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  • Coaches are not teachers, but they teach.
  • Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.
  • Coaches are like editors, another slippery invention.
  • The coaching model is different from the traditional conception of pedagogy, where there’s a presumption that, after a certain point, the student no longer needs instruction
  • Doctors understand expertise in the same way.
  • We have to keep developing our capabilities and avoid falling behind.
  • Expertise is thought to be not a static condition but one that doctors must build and sustain for themselves.
  • Coaching in pro sports proceeds from a starkly different premise: it considers the teaching model naïve about our human capacity for self-perfection.
  • “My wife always says that I don’t really know how I play,” he told me. “She is an extra ear.”
  • The professional singers I spoke to describe their coaches in nearly identical terms. “We refer to them as our ‘outside ears,’ ” the great soprano Renée Fleming told me.
  • Élite performers, researchers say, must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires.
  • So outside ears, and eyes, are important for concert-calibre musicians and Olympic-level athletes
  • For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers.
  • Policymakers have pushed mostly carrot-and-stick remedies: firing underperforming teachers, giving merit pay to high performers, penalizing schools with poor student test scores.
  • alifornia researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools,
  • Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time.
  • But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent.
  • Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.
  • One thing that seems clear, though, is that not all coaches are effective
  • Researchers from the University of Virginia found that many teachers see no need for coaching.
  • Novice teachers often struggle with the basic behavioral issues.
  • Good coaches know how to break down performance into its critical individual components
  • It holds that, no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own.
  • She told me that she had begun to burn out. “I felt really isolated, too,” she said.
  • The coaching has definitely changed how satisfying teaching is,” she said.
  • Yet the stranger thing, it occurred to me, was that no senior colleague had come to observe me in the eight years since I’d established my surgical practice
  • I’d had no outside ears and eyes.
  • Since I have taken on a coach, my complication rate has gone down.
  • Coaching has become a fad in recent years. There are leadership coaches, executive coaches, life coaches, and college-application coaches
  • The sort of coaching that fosters effective innovation and judgment, not merely the replication of technique, may not be so easy to cultivate
  • We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.
  • But the capabilities of doctors matter every bit as much as the technology.
  • What ultimately makes the difference is how well people use technology.
  • We have devoted disastrously little attention to fostering those abilities.
  • The prospect of coaching forces awkward questions about how we regard failure
  • But I had let Osteen see my judgment fail; I’d let him see that I may not be who I want to be.
  • Your performance is not determined by where you stand or where your elbow goes. It’s determined by where you decide to stand, where you decide to put your elbow.
  • “Most surgery is done in your head,”
  • we may not be ready to accept—or pay for—a cadre of people who identify the flaws in the professionals upon whom we rely
  • Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance
Susan Glassett Farrelly

Technology Experts in Schools: Teacher Leaders or Technicians? - Leading From the Class... - 0 views

blogs.edweek.org/...er_leaders_or_technicians.html

experts technology teachingteachers teaching

shared by Susan Glassett Farrelly on 24 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Susan Glassett Farrelly on 24 Oct 11
     
    "Technology Experts in Schools: Teacher Leaders or Technicians?"
Sherilyn Crawford

A new yardstick to measure schools? | SignOnSanDiego.com - 1 views

www.signonsandiego.com/...rethinking-school-assessment

students education learning classroom standardized testing policy

shared by Sherilyn Crawford on 05 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Sherilyn Crawford on 05 Oct 11
     
    This article talks about new legislation on Governor Brown's desk in California and the idea that "control" of education should pass from Federal to State.
Sherilyn Crawford

Pow! How Comics in the Classroom Can Combat Bullying | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...ention-comic-strips-suzie-boss

education students learning classroom technology teaching bullying comics

shared by Sherilyn Crawford on 08 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Sherilyn Crawford on 08 Oct 11
     
    This article talks about the website Bitstrips for Schools and how you can use technology in the classroom by creating comic strips, and how teachers have been using them to combat bullying.
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