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Troy Patterson

Message to My Freshman Students | Keith M. Parsons - 1 views

  • Your teachers were not allowed to teach, but were required to focus on preparing you for those all-important standardized tests.
  • Your teachers were held responsible if you failed, and expected to show that they had tried hard to avoid that dreaded result.
  • First, I am your professor, not your teacher. There is a difference.
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  • Teachers are evaluated on the basis of learning outcomes, generally as measured by standardized tests. If you don't learn, then your teacher is blamed.
  • We should not foolishly expect them to listen to us, but instead cater to their conditioned craving for constant stimulation.
  • Hogwash. You need to learn to listen.
  • Critical listening means that are not just hearing but thinking about what you are hearing. Critical listening questions and evaluates what is being said and seeks key concepts and unifying themes. Your high school curriculum would have served you better had it focused more on developing your listening skills rather than drilling you on test-taking.
  • For an academic, there is something sacred about a citation. The proper citation of a source is a small tribute to the hard work, diligence, intelligence and integrity of someone dedicated enough to make a contribution to knowledge.
  • For you, citations and bibliographies are pointless hoops to jump through and you often treat these requirements carelessly.
  • Your professor still harbors the traditional view that universities are about education. If your aim is to get a credential, then for you courses will be obstacles in your path. For your professor, a course is an opportunity for you to make your world richer and yourself stronger.
Felipp Tam

Two Thumbs Up for Hotels Cagayan de Oro - 1 views

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started by Felipp Tam on 14 Jun 11 no follow-up yet
Troy Patterson

Updating Data-Driven Instruction and the Practice of Teaching | Larry Cuban on School R... - 0 views

  • I am talking about data-driven instruction–a way of making teaching less subjective, more objective, less experience-based, more scientific.
  • Data-driven instruction, advocates say, is scientific and consistent with how successful businesses have used data for decades to increase their productivity.
  • Of course, teachers had always assessed learning informally before state- and district-designed tests. Teachers accumulated information (oops! data) from pop quizzes, class discussions, observing students in pairs and small groups, and individual conferences.
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  • Based on these data, teachers revised lessons. Teachers leaned heavily on their experience with students and the incremental learning they had accumulated from teaching 180 days, year after year.
  • Teachers’ informal assessments of students gathered information directly and  would lead to altered lessons.
  • In the 1990s and, especially after No Child Left Behind became law in 2002, the electronic gathering of data, disaggregating information by groups and individuals, and then applying lessons learned from analysis of tests and classroom practices became a top priority.
  • Now, principals and teachers are awash in data.
  • How do teachers use the massive data available to them on student performance?
  • studied four elementary school grade-level teams in how they used data to improve lessons. She found that supportive principals and superintendents and habits of collaboration increased use of data to alter lessons in two of the cases but not in the other two.
  • Julie Marsh and her colleagues found 15 where teachers used annual tests, for example, in basic ways to target weaknesses in professional development or to schedule double periods of language arts for English language learners.
  • These researchers admitted, however, that they could not connect student achievement to the 36 instances of basic to complex data-driven decisions  in these two districts.
  • Of these studies, the expert panel found 64 that used experimental or quasi-experimental designs and only six–yes, six–met the Institute of Education Sciences standard for making causal claims about data-driven decisions improving student achievement. When reviewing these six studies, however, the panel found “low evidence” (rather than “moderate” or “strong” evidence) to support data-driven instruction. In short, the assumption that data-driven instructional decisions improve student test scores is, well, still an assumption not a fact.
  • Numbers may be facts. Numbers may be objective. Numbers may smell scientific. But we give meaning to these numbers. Data-driven instruction may be a worthwhile reform but as an evidence-based educational practice linked to student achievement, rhetoric notwithstanding, it is not there yet.
Troy Patterson

Public schools aren't failing | CharlotteObserver.com - 0 views

  • In fact, both show that American public school children are doing remarkably well.
  • For example, the NCES report shows that in schools with less than 25 percent poverty rates, American children scored higher in reading than any other children in the world. In. The. World.
  • The takeaway is simple. Our middle-class and wealthy public school children are thriving. Poor children are struggling, not because their schools are failing but because they come to school with all the well-documented handicaps that poverty imposes – poor prenatal care, developmental delays, hunger, illness, homelessness, emotional and mental illnesses, and so on.
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  • public school children outscored their private school counterparts, and nationally, charters are outperformed by traditional schools the majority of the time.
  • “the charter school movement [is] quickly becoming a backdoor for corporate profit.”
  • research is clear that money spent addressing the issues of child poverty are the most effective way to move test scores up
  • “Nobody understands the challenges and shortcomings of American schools better than the people who have dedicated their lives to them.” Yet educators are rarely asked for their expertise.
  • If policy makers were to listen to educators – and to students and parents – they would hear that the real crisis in public education is the loss of our collective commitment to the common good.
Troy Patterson

The Sabermetrics of Effort - Jonah Lehrer - 0 views

  • The fundamental premise of Moneyball is that the labor market of sports is inefficient, and that many teams systematically undervalue particular athletic skills that help them win. While these skills are often subtle – and the players that possess them tend to toil in obscurity - they can be identified using sophisticated statistical techniques, aka sabermetrics. Home runs are fun. On-base percentage is crucial.
  • The wisdom of the moneyball strategy is no longer controversial. It’s why the A’s almost always outperform their payroll,
  • However, the triumph of moneyball creates a paradox, since its success depends on the very market inefficiencies it exposes. The end result is a relentless search for new undervalued skills, those hidden talents that nobody else seems to appreciate. At least not yet.
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  •  One study found that baseball players significantly improved their performance in the final year of their contracts, just before entering free-agency. (Another study found a similar trend among NBA players.) What explained this improvement? Effort. Hustle. Blood, sweat and tears. The players wanted a big contract, so they worked harder.
  • If a player runs too little during a game, it’s not because his body gives out – it’s because his head doesn’t want to.
  • despite the obvious impact of effort, it’s surprisingly hard to isolate as a variable of athletic performance. Weimer and Wicker set out to fix this oversight. Using data gathered from three seasons and 1514 games of the Bundesliga – the premier soccer league in Germany – the economists attempted to measure individual effort as a variable of player performance,
  • So did these differences in levels of effort matter? The answer is an emphatic yes: teams with players that run longer distances are more likely to win the game,
  • As the economists note, “teams where some players run a lot while others are relatively lazy have a higher winning probability.”
  • There is a larger lesson here, which is that our obsession with measuring talent has led us to neglect the measurement of effort. This is a blind spot that extends far beyond the realm of professional sports.
  • Maximum tests are high-stakes assessments that try to measure a person’s peak level of performance. Think here of the SAT, or the NFL Combine, or all those standardized tests we give to our kids. Because these tests are relatively short, we assume people are motivated enough to put in the effort while they’re being measured. As a result, maximum tests are good at quantifying individual talent, whether it’s scholastic aptitude or speed in the 40-yard dash.
  • Unfortunately, the brevity of maximum tests means they are not very good at predicting future levels of effort. Sackett has demonstrated this by comparing the results from maximum tests to field studies of typical performance, which is a measure of how people perform when they are not being tested.
  • As Sackett came to discover, the correlation between these two assessments is often surprisingly low: the same people identified as the best by a maximum test often unperformed according to the measure of typical performance, and vice versa.
  • What accounts for the mismatch between maximum tests and typical performance? One explanation is that, while maximum tests are good at measuring talent, typical performance is about talent plus effort.
  • In the real world, you can’t assume people are always motivated to try their hardest. You can’t assume they are always striving to do their best. Clocking someone in a sprint won’t tell you if he or she has the nerve to run a marathon, or even 12 kilometers in a soccer match.
  • With any luck, these sabermetric innovations will trickle down to education, which is still mired in maximum high-stakes tests that fail to directly measure or improve the levels of effort put forth by students.
  • After all, those teams with the hardest workers (and not just the most talented ones) significantly increase their odds of winning.
  • Old-fashioned effort just might be the next on-base percentage.
Troy Patterson

8 Ways to Level Up Game Based Learning in the Classroom - 0 views

  • 1. Make Your Whole Class a Game Experience
  • 2. Engage with Minecraft: Let Kids Build in the Sandbox
  • 4. Play Games for Social Good: Have a Point, Don’t Just Earn Them
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  • 3. Build a Game Experience into Learning: Live It and Learn It
  • 5. Game Based Platforms for Learning
  • 6. Experience Learning: Immerse Yourself in the Experience
  • 7. Go Offline or Outside: You Don’t Need Tech to Teach
  • 8. Create Solutions as You Learn: Gifts from the Hour of Code
Troy Patterson

Students 'Self-Assess' Their Way to Learning - Education Week - 0 views

  • Tacyana will be asked to determine how her own work stacks up to a model.
  • Gust is one of a growing number of schools across the country where student self-assessment is one type of formative assessment that is woven into the school day.
  • 'Hey, wait a minute, kids have to be involved, too.'"
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  • Learning is much deeper if the student is thinking, 'I am doing this because it will help me learn this.'
  • actively judging their work and progress toward a goal, and determining what steps to take to reach it.
  • "The expectation is that not only are teachers using data, students are owning data,"
  • Padilla said it takes time to teach students how to read rubrics or use systems to track their progress. But, she said, the shift is worth it. "I think students tracking their own data is key to getting students invested in their education," she said. "If they don't see the direct results in that moment, it's hard for them to know where to go."
ocalmy

Study examines Wallace Foundation's Wallace principal pipeline project - 0 views

  • I would think it would take years for a new principal to replace teachers and make curriculum changes that would eventually trickle down to students and grow over time. More research is needed to understand what things new principals are doing immediately that boost learning throughout the building.
    • ocalmy
       
      I would bet it's about an improvement in school culture and moral, which naturally leads to greater student achievement because teachers have their heads and hearts in the game.
Troy Patterson

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

  • 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.”
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  • 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.”
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