Skip to main content

Home/ Middle School Matters/ Group items tagged Post-it

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Ron King

Should Schools Teach Social Media Skills? - 0 views

  •  
    Taking selfies at funerals. Tagging pictures of teens drinking alcohol at parties. Kids (and adults for that matter) post a lot of silly stuff online - and although most of it is chatter, some of what might seem harmless leads to tragic consequences. But is it the job of schools to teach kids the dos and don'ts of social media?
Ron King

THE NUMBERS PROJECT - 0 views

shared by Ron King on 09 Oct 13 - No Cached
  •  
    THE NUMBERS PROJECT IS A DAILY PROJECT TO ELEVATE MY MENTAL PROCESS OF CREATIVE THINKING, AS WELL AS SIMPLY TO CREATE DAILY. TECHNICALLY THE GOAL WAS TO KEEP IT CONCEPTUALLY SIMPLE, WHICH IS WHY NUMBERS BECAME THE SUBJECT MATTER. TO BE EXACT 0- 365 CONSECUTIVELY, 1 A DAY FOR 2013. THE GUIDELINES THAT I HAVE IMPOSED ON MYSELF ARE TO ONLY USE THE SINGLE COLOR OF BLACK, A NOD TO CLASSIC LOGO DESIGN AND I LIMIT MY TIME, 30 MINUTES SKETCHING, 30 MINUTES ON THE COMPUTER, SO AFTER AN HOUR IT GETS POSTED, DONE OR NOT. I'M SURE SOME WILL BE TERRIBLE..HA, BUT THE PURPOSE IS PROCESS NOT NECESSARILY THE OUTCOME.
Ron King

Professional Development is Broken, but Be Careful How We Fix It | teaching/math/culture - 0 views

  •  
    This morning, Jal Mehta tagged me on a tweet to linking to his recent Education Week blog post, entitled “Let’s End Professional Development as We Know It.” The following exchange…
Troy Patterson

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

  • 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

Why Malcolm Gladwell Matters (And Why That's Unfortunate) - 0 views

  •  
    Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker writer and perennial bestselling author, has a new book out. It's called David and Goliath: Misfits, Underdogs, and the Art of Battling Giants. I reviewed it (PDF) in last weekend's edition of The Wall Street Journal. (Other reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Millions, to name a few.) Even though the WSJ editors kindly gave me about 2500 words to go into depth about the book, there were many things I did not have space to discuss or elaborate on. This post contains some additional thoughts about Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath, the general modus operandi of his writing, and how he and others conceive of what he is doing.
Troy Patterson

The Whiteboard Blog - 1 views

  •  
    "Here's a short post to highlight three video guides I produced a while back which outline three different things that you can do with Smart Notebook to produce simple lesson resources. The ideas can be carried across to other IWB software, but the videos show how to do it in Smart Notebook."
Troy Patterson

Sir Ken Robinson has a lot to say about U.S. school reform (it isn't good) - The Washin... - 0 views

  •  
    "Sir Ken Robinson has a lot to say about U.S. school reform (it isn't good)"
Troy Patterson

The Test of the Common Core | E. D. Hirsch, Jr. - 0 views

  • Here's the follow-up post to "Why I'm For the Common Core." It explains why we should be leery of the forthcoming "core-aligned" tests -- especially those in English Language Arts that people are rightly anxious about.
  • These tests could endanger the promise of the Common Core.
  • The first thing I'd want to do if I were younger would be to launch an effective court challenge to value-added teacher evaluations on the basis of test scores in reading comprehension. The value-added approach to teacher evaluation in reading is unsound both technically and in its curriculum-narrowing effects. The connection between job ratings and tests in ELA has been a disaster for education.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • My analysis of them showed what anyone immersed in reading research would have predicted: The value-added data are modestly stable for math, but are fuzzy and unreliable for reading.
  • Math tests are based on the school curriculum. What a teacher does in the math classroom affects student test scores. But reading-comprehension tests are not based on the school curriculum. (How could they be if there's no set curriculum?) Rather, they are based on the general knowledge that students have gained over their life span from all sources -- most of them outside the school.
  • The whole project is unfair to teachers, ill-conceived, and educationally disastrous. The teacher-rating scheme has usurped huge amounts of teaching time in anxious test-prep. Paradoxically, the evidence shows that test-prep ceases to be effective after about six lessons.
  • the inadequate theories of reading-comprehension that have dominated the schools -- mainly the unfounded theory that, when students reach a certain level of "reading skill," they can read anything at that level.
  • The Common Core-aligned tests of reading comprehension will naturally contain text passages and questions about those passages. To the extent such tests claim to assess "critical thinking" and "general" reading-comprehension skill, we should hold on to our wallets. They will be only rough indexes of reading ability -- probably no better than the perfectly adequate and well-validated reading tests they mean to replace.
  • The solution to the test-prep conundrum is this: First, institute in every participating state the specific and coherent curriculum that the Common Core Standards explicitly call for. (It's passing odd to introduce "Common Core" tests before there's an actual core to be tested.)
Troy Patterson

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

  •  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.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • 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

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

  • 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
Troy Patterson

A surprising new argument against using kids' test scores to grade their teachers - The... - 1 views

  • This dispute is just one example of the mathematical acrobatics required to isolate the effect of one teacher on their students' test scores, when so many other factors inside and outside the school's walls affect how students perform.
  • When a teacher whose students do well on tests moves to a school where test scores were improving the previous year, and average scores continue improving after that teacher arrives, it is hard to know how much of that continued improvement is due to the new teacher and how much to other factors.
Troy Patterson

20 Strategies for Motivating Reluctant Learners | MindShift | KQED News - 0 views

  • Perez says when students are engaged, predicting answers, talking with one another and sharing with the class in ways that follow safe routines and practices, they not only achieve more but they also act out less. And everyone, including the teacher, has more fun.
  • PEREZ’ BRAIN-BASED STRATEGIES
  • 1. Don’t Be Boring
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • 2. Vote
  • 3. Set Goals
  • 4. Form Groups
  • 5. Quick Writes
  • 6. Focus on the ABCs: Acceptance, Belonging and Community
  • 7. Continually change the “state” of the classroom
  • 8. Empathize
  • 9.  Do a BRAIN checklist
  • 10. Simplify
  • 11. Chunk Information
  • 12. Props
  • 13. Breaks
  • 14. Post-Its
  • 15. Make Snowballs
  • 16. Guessing Games
  • 17. Balanced Inquiry
  • 18. Mind-streaming
  • 19. Be Interactive
  • 20. HOPE
1 - 20 of 22 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page