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Troy Patterson

Principal: Why our new educator evaluation system is unethical - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...evaluation-system-is-unethical

msm245

shared by Troy Patterson on 30 May 13 - No Cached
  • A few years ago, a student at my high school was having a terrible time passing one of the exams needed to earn a Regents Diploma.
  • Mary has a learning disability that truly impacts her retention and analytical thinking.
  • Because she was a special education student, at the time there was an easier exam available, the RCT, which she could take and then use to earn a local high school diploma instead of the Regents Diploma.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Regents Diploma serves as a motivator for our students while providing an objective (though imperfect) measure of accomplishment.
  • If they do not pass a test the first time, it is not awful if they take it again—we use it as a diagnostic, help them fill the learning gaps, and only the passing score goes on the transcript
  • in Mary’s case, to ask her to take that test yet once again would have been tantamount to child abuse.
  • Mary’s story, therefore, points to a key reason why evaluating teachers and principals by test scores is wrong.
  • It illustrates how the problems with value-added measures of performance go well beyond the technicalities of validity and reliability.
  • The basic rule is this: No measure of performance used for high-stakes purposes should put the best interests of students in conflict with the best interests of the adults who serve them.
  • I will just point out that under that system I may be penalized if future students like Mary do not achieve a 65 on the Regents exam.
  • Mary and I can still make the choice to say “enough”, but it may cost me a “point”, if a majority of students who had the same middle school scores on math and English tests that she did years before, pass the test.
  • But I can also be less concerned about the VAM-based evaluation system because it’s very likely to be biased in favor of those like me who lead schools that have only one or two students like Mary every year.
  • When we have an ELL (English language learner) student with interrupted education arrive at our school, we often consider a plan that includes an extra year of high school.
  • last few years “four year graduation rates” are of high importance
  • four-year graduation rate as a high-stakes measure has resulted in the proliferation of “credit recovery” programs of dubious quality, along with teacher complaints of being pressured to pass students with poor attendance and grades, especially in schools under threat of closure.
  • On the one hand, they had a clear incentive to “test prep” for the recent Common Core exams, but they also knew that test prep was not the instruction that their students needed and deserved.
  • in New York and in many other Race to the Top states, continue to favor “form over substance” and allow the unintended consequences of a rushed models to be put in place.
  • Creating bell curves of relative educator performance may look like progress and science, but these are measures without meaning, and they do not help schools improve.
  • We can raise every bar and continue to add high-stakes measures. Or we can acknowledge and respond to the reality that school improvement takes time, capacity building, professional development, and financial support at the district, state and national levels.
Ron King

Michael Haberman: Why School Culture Matters, and How to Improve It - 1 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-culture-matter_b_3047318.html

shared by Ron King on 29 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 29 Apr 13
     
    From elementary school to high school, school choice is an integral part of U.S. urban education today. In New York City, eighth graders just learned if they'd been accepted into one of their top high school selections, and in the coming weeks, families will learn where their children will be attending kindergarten in the fall.
Ron King

Standards Based Grading: District-Wide Journey - 1 views

mctownsley.blogspot.com/...sed-grading-district-wide.html

shared by Ron King on 07 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 07 Apr 13
     
    It's a pretty exciting time to work in my current school district. About twenty years ago, the elementary school implemented a standards-based report card. Over the past several years, we've seen a grassroots movement in the area of assessment and grading reform in our secondary buildings. Dozens of teachers and building leadership teams have visited and/or inquired about what's going on in our high school and middle school, which is one of the reasons we'll soon be co-hosting a standards-based grading conference in eastern Iowa (before you ask, we've reached our registration capacity and the waiting list has been closed as well).
Ron King

Teaching along the Edge - 0 views

cindirigsbee.com/teaching-along-the-edge

shared by Ron King on 09 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 09 Dec 13
     
    A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to serve as a discussant after a group of panelists, all teachers in the "spring" of their careers (even one first year teacher), spoke on transforming classrooms and schools. The panel discussion was part of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education's symposium called "Education for a New Era." This particular session was entitled "Teaching Along the Edge," and the moderator, Dr. Jocelyn Glazier (a former high school English teacher and current associate professor at UNC), shared that she wanted "to find the places where there is light" in education. She shared that "education is a practice of freedom," and she hoped the panelists would look at current inequities and move students "beyond basic skills."
Troy Patterson

Oregon House Considers Adding 'Future Plans' As High School Graduation Requirement| The... - 0 views

www.21stcenturyfluency.com/blogpost.cfm

msm msm168 learning

shared by Troy Patterson on 30 May 11 - No Cached
  • Troy Patterson on 30 May 11
     
    While schools across the country continue to balance budgets and consider different methods to make their students college-bound, Oregon representatives may have come up with their own solution to get students ready for the future. In an attempt to increase Oregonians' employment options, the Oregon House of Representatives recently passed a bill that requires high school students to demonstrate a clear path for future education or job opportunities before they can graduate.
Troy Patterson

16 Modern Realities Schools (and Parents) Need to Accept. Now. - Modern Learning - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...eed-to-accept-now-64b98710e4e9

msm332

shared by Troy Patterson on 23 May 16 - No Cached
  • What’s happened to get people thinking and talking about “different” instead of “better?”
  • The Web and the technologies that drive it are fundamentally changing the way we think about how we can learn and become educated in a globally networked and connected world. It has absolutely exploded our ability to learn on our own in ways that schools weren’t built for.
  • In that respect, current systems of schooling are an increasingly significant barrier to progress when it comes to learning.
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  • The middleman is vanishing as peer to peer interactions flourish. Teachers no longer stand between the content and the student. This will change the nature of the profession.
  • Technology is no longer an option when it comes to learning at mastery levels.
  • Curriculum is just a guess, and now that we have access to so much information and knowledge, the current school curriculum bucket represents (as Seymour Papert suggests) “one-billionth of one percent” of all there is to know. Our odds of choosing the “right” mix for all of our kids’ futures are infinitesimal.
  • The skills, literacies, and dispositions required to navigate this increasingly complex and change filled world are much different from those stressed in the current school curriculum.
  • In fact, instead of being delivered by an institution, curriculum is now constructed and negotiated in real time by learner and the contributions of those engaged in the learning process, whether in the classroom our out.
  • “High stakes” learning is now about doing real work for real audiences, not taking a standardized subject matter test.
  • While important, the 4Cs of creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication are no longer enough. Being able to connect to other learners worldwide and to use computing applications to solve problems are the two additional “Cs” required in the modern world.
  • Our children will live and work in a much more transparent world as tools to publish pictures, video, and texts become more accessible and more ubiquitous. Their online reputations must be built and managed.
  • Workers in the future will not “find employment;” Employment will find them. Or they will create their own.
  • Embracing and adapting to change must be in the modern skill set.
Troy Patterson

Homework: An unnecessary evil? … Surprising findings from new research - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ing-findings-from-new-research

msm286 homework

shared by Troy Patterson on 04 Oct 14 - No Cached
  •  A brand-new study on the academic effects of homework offers not only some intriguing results but also a lesson on how to read a study — and a reminder of the importance of doing just that:  reading studies (carefully) rather than relying on summaries by journalists or even by the researchers themselves.
  • First, no research has ever found a benefit to assigning homework (of any kind or in any amount) in elementary school.  In fact, there isn’t even a positive correlation between, on the one hand, having younger children do some homework (vs. none), or more (vs. less), and, on the other hand, any measure of achievement.  If we’re making 12-year-olds, much less five-year-olds, do homework, it’s either because we’re misinformed about what the evidence says or because we think kids ought to have to do homework despite what the evidence says.
  • Second, even at the high school level, the research supporting homework hasn’t been particularly persuasive.
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  • It’s easy to miss one interesting result in this study that appears in a one-sentence aside.  When kids in these two similar datasets were asked how much time they spent on math homework each day, those in the NELS study said 37 minutes, whereas those in the ELS study said 60 minutes. 
  • it was statistically significant but “very modest”:  Even assuming the existence of a causal relationship, which is by no means clear, one or two hours’ worth of homework every day buys you two or three points on a test.
  • There was no relationship whatsoever between time spent on homework and course grade, and “no substantive difference in grades between students who complete homework and those who do not.”
  • The better the research, the less likely one is to find any benefits from homework.
  • you’ll find that there’s not much to prop up the belief that students must be made to work a second shift after they get home from school.  The assumption that teachers are just assigning homework badly, that we’d start to see meaningful results if only it were improved, is harder and harder to justify with each study that’s published.
  • many people will respond to these results by repeating platitudes about the importance of practice[8], or by complaining that anyone who doesn’t think kids need homework is coddling them and failing to prepare them for the “real world” (read:  the pointless tasks they’ll be forced to do after they leave school).
Troy Patterson

This Week In Education: Thompson: How Houston's Test and Punish Policies Fail - 0 views

scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/...-and-punish-policies-fail.html

msm307 educationreform

shared by Troy Patterson on 06 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • I often recall Houston's Apollo 20 experiment, designed to bring "No Excuses" charter school methods to neighborhood schools. Its output-driven, reward and punish policies failed.  It was incredibly expensive, costing $52 million and it didn't increase reading scores. Intensive math tutoring produced test score gains in that subject. The only real success was due to the old-fashioned, win-win, input-driven method of hiring more counselors.
  • Michels finds no evidence that Grier's test-driven accountability has benefitted students, but he describes the great success of constructive programs that build on kids' strengths and provide them more opportunities.
  • With the help of local philanthropies, however, Houston has introduced a wide range of humane, holistic, and effective programs. Michels starts with Las Americas Newcomer School, which is "on paper a failing school." It offers group therapy and social workers who help immigrants "navigate bureaucratic barriers—like proof of residency or vaccination records." He then describes outstanding early education programs that are ready to be scaled up, such as  the Gabriela Mistral Center for Early Childhood, and Project Grad which has provided counseling and helped more than 7,600 students go to college.
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  • Children who attended the Neighborhood Centers' Head Start program produce higher test scores - as high as 94% proficient in 3rd grade reading.
  • It agreed with the program's chief advocate, Roland Fryer, that the math tutoring showed results but doubted that the score increases were sustainable."
  • but who says, “At the end of the day, you need to show up on time, you need to have the right mindset for work and you probably need to read, write and understand science." In other words, test scores might be important, but it is the immeasurable social and emotional factors that really matter.
  • What if we shifted the focus from the weaknesses of students and teachers to a commitment to building on the positive?
  • Grier's test and punish policies have already failed and been downsized. Of course, I would like to hear an open acknowledgement that test-driven reform was a dead end. But, mostly likely, systems will just let data-driven accountability quietly shrivel and die. Then, we can commit to the types of  Win Win policies that have a real chance of helping poor children of color.
Ron King

Student Engagement More Complex, Changeable Than Thought | University of Pittsburgh News - 0 views

www.news.pitt.edu/...x-changeable-previously-though

shared by Ron King on 22 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 22 Jun 13
     
    "Enhancing student engagement has been identified as the key to addressing problems of low achievement, high levels of student misbehavior, alienation, and high dropout rates." - Pitt professor Ming-Te Wang
Troy Patterson

The Principal: The Most Misunderstood Person in All of Education - Kate Rousmaniere - T... - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281223

msm265 leadership

shared by Troy Patterson on 02 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • In American public schools, the principal is the most complex and contradictory figure in the pantheon of educational leadership.
  • A few years ago when I walked the hallways of a high school with my five-year-old niece Evie, she remarked, without prompting: “There’s the principal’s office: you only go there if you are in trouble.”
  • Most remarkably, those very people who did not understand what a principal did were often the first to argue for the abolition of the role.
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  • The history of the principal offers even more contradictions. Contemporary principals work in the midst of unique modern challenges of ever-changing fiscal supports, school law and policy, community values, and youth culture.
  • The complex role of the principal is not an accidental by-product of history; rather, the principal’s position at the nexus of educational policy and practice was an intentional component of the role when it was originally conceived.
  • Like other middle managers, the principal had a “dual personality,” standing “on the middle ground between management and employee,” as both a loyal sergeant to a distant supervisor and a local administrator who had to negotiate with workers in order to get the job done properly.
  • Through the mid-20th century, the principalship was an inconsistently defined position, as often a teacher with administrative responsibilities as an administrator who supervised teachers.
  • As the principalship evolved away from the classroom to the administrative office, the principal became less connected with student learning, and yet more responsible for it.
  • Modern principals came to have less to do with student learning and more to do with upholding administrative structures and responding to public pressures.
  • For all those efforts, however, the history of the principalship is marked by an increasing discrepancy between the popular image and the actual work of the position. Ironic too, is the dominant image of the principalship with an office, given the great variety, mobility, human interactions, and community relations of principals’ work.
Troy Patterson

Curiosity Is a Unique Marker of Academic Success - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...534573

msm365 motivation teaching

shared by Troy Patterson on 27 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Yet in actual schools, curiosity is drastically underappreciated.
  • The power of curiosity to contribute not only to high achievement, but also to a fulfilling existence, cannot be emphasized enough.
  • When Orville Wright, of the Wright brothers fame, was told by a friend that he and his brother would always be an example of how far someone can go in life with no special advantages, he emphatically responded, “to say we had no special advantages … the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.”
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • They initiated their study in 1979, and have been assessing the participants based on a wide range of variables (e.g., school performance, IQ, leadership, happiness) across multiple contexts (laboratory and home) since.
  • Cognitive giftedness matters.
  • While intellectually gifted children were not different than the comparison group with respect to their temperament, behavioral, social, or emotional functioning, they did differ in regards to their advanced sensory and motor functioning starting at age 1.5, their ability to understand the meaning of words starting at age 1, and their ability to both understand and communicate information thereafter.
  • Parents of intellectually gifted children reported similar observations and were more likely than those of average children to say that their kids actively elicited stimulation by, for example, requesting intellectual extracurricular activities.
  • The researchers also measured what they described as academic intrinsic motivation and identified the top 19 percent of the 111 adolescent participants as “motivationally gifted,” displaying extreme enjoyment of school and of learning of challenging, difficult, and novel tasks and an orientation toward mastery, curiosity, and persistence.
  • Interestingly, they found very little correspondence between intellectual giftedness and motivational giftedness.
  • Students with gifted curiosity outperformed their peers on a wide range of educational outcomes, including math and reading, SAT scores, and college attainment. According to ratings from teachers, the motivationally gifted students worked harder and learned more.
  • suggest that gifted curiosity is a distinct characteristic that contributes uniquely to academic success.
  • “Motivation should not be considered simply a catalyst for the development of other forms of giftedness, but should be nurtured in its own right,”
  • All in all, the Fullerton study is proof that giftedness is not something an individual is either born with or without—giftedness is clearly a developmental process.
  • “giftedness is not a chance event … giftedness will blossom when children’s cognitive ability, motivation and enriched environments coexist and meld together to foster its growth.”
Ron King

Common Core Math Tools via NCTM - 0 views

www.nctm.org/...content.aspx

shared by Ron King on 13 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 13 Apr 13
     
    Core Math Tools is a downloadable suite of interactive software tools for algebra and functions, geometry and trigonometry, and statistics and probability. The tools are appropriate for use with any high school mathematics curriculum and compatible with the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics in terms of content and mathematical practices. Java required.
Ron King

Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium - 0 views

www.smarterbalanced.org

shared by Ron King on 23 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 23 Apr 13
     
    Smarter Balanced is a state-led consortium developing assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards in English language arts/literacy and mathematics that are designed to help prepare all students to graduate high school college- and career-ready.
Ron King

A Dress-Code Enforcer's Struggle for the Soul of the Middle-School Girl - Atlantic Mobile - 2 views

m.theatlantic.com/...273155

shared by Ron King on 29 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 29 Apr 13
     
    Junior high is a weird, often heartbreaking time for young women-and it might be just as weird and heartbreaking for their teachers.
Troy Patterson

Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns - The Washington... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...is-shocked-at-what-she-learned

msm335 education

shared by Troy Patterson on 01 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • High school students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90 percent of their classes.
  • In eight periods of high school classes, my host students rarely spoke.
  • much of the day was spent absorbing information but not often grappling with it.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • realize how little autonomy students have, how little of their learning they are directing or choosing
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