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Shawn McGirr

Me on the Web : Google Dashboard - Accounts Help - 0 views

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    Manage your image on the Web.
Ron King

They Need Us to Understand Them « Middle Grades Math Focus - 1 views

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    A coworker of mine summed up perfectly the issue of classroom management in middle school: "If you treat them like babies, they will act like babies."  I believe the logic then dictates that if you treat them like adults, then they will become one of your greatest professional assets.
Troy Patterson

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

  • 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.
Ron King

Can't We Do Better? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    THE latest results in the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which compare how well 15-year-olds in 65 cities and countries can apply math, science and reading skills to solve real-world problems were released last week, and it wasn't pretty for the home team. Andreas Schleicher, who manages PISA, told the Department of Education: "Three years ago, I came here with a special report benchmarking the U.S. against some of the best performing and rapidly improving education systems. Most of them have pulled further ahead, whether it is Brazil that advanced from the bottom, Germany and Poland that moved from adequate to good, or Shanghai and Singapore that moved from good to great. The math results of top-performer Shanghai are now two-and-a-half school years ahead even of those in Massachusetts - itself a leader within the U.S."
Troy Patterson

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

  • 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

Gifted & Talented…and Afraid | EduGuide - 1 views

  • In fourth grade, I was one of three students selected to participate in a “Gifted & Talented” program. My parents were so proud; I was one of the “smart kids,” a brilliant writer and a natural actress, and life was going to be so easy for me.
  • getting the right answers, best grades, and lead roles in school plays wasn’t about learning; it was about proving, to myself and the world, that I deserved that “Gifted & Talented” distinction.
  • I was afraid to take risks that might show me off as anything less than innately brilliant.
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  • I avoided subjects I found difficult, padding my schedule with all English and Social Studies while skipping Math and Science. I stopped trying out for school plays, afraid of not being cast as a lead.
  • as for writing, supposedly my greatest “natural talent,” I hoarded everything I wrote and never managed to finish or submit a single manuscript for publication. Because even one rejection letter wouldn’t have just meant that my story wasn’t good enough; it would have meant that I, as a human being, was not good enough.
  • for me, the “Gifted & Talented” label unintentionally contributed to what psychologist Carol Dweck would call a “fixed mindset”:
  • The categories are not “smart” and “dumb”; they are “learned that already” and “haven’t learned that yet.”
  • As a fourth grader, I wasn’t more gifted or talented than anyone else; I had just learned a little more about theater, literature and writing, thanks to my parents, than many of my peers had.
  • That didn’t make me smart or talented any more than it made my peers stupid.
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