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Ron King

Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize - Philip Treisman (NCTM Conference) - 0 views

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

Equity

shared by Ron King on 23 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 23 Apr 13
     
    NCTM has committed itself to equity, with many of us working toward a new generation of mathematics-savvy citizens and STEM professionals representing our diverse population. We need to take stock of the record and take action from the state house to the classroom, so that our vision becomes reality and our hopes for our students are realized. Philip "Uri" Treisman is professor of mathematics and of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he directs the Charles A. Dana Center. He is a senior adviser to the Aspen Institute's Urban Superintendents' Network and recently served on the 21st-Century Commission on the Future of Community Colleges. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1992 for his work on nurturing minority student achievement in college mathematics and 2006 Scientist of the Year by the Harvard Foundation of Harvard University for his outstanding contributions to mathematics. In all his work, Treisman advocates for equity and excellence in education for all children. Philip Uri Treisman Charles A. Dana Center, University of Texas at Austin
Troy Patterson

Differentiation Doesn't Work - Education Week - 0 views

www.edweek.org/...fferentiation-doesnt-work.html

msm294 differentiation education

shared by Troy Patterson on 06 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Let's review the educational cure-alls of past decades: back to basics, the open classroom, whole language, constructivism, and E.D. Hirsch's excruciatingly detailed accounts of what every 1st or 3rd grader should know, to name a few.
  • Starting with the gifted-education community in the late 1960s, differentiation didn't get its mojo going until regular educators jumped onto the bandwagon in the 1980s.
  • Differentiation is a failure, a farce, and the ultimate educational joke played on countless educators and students.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • In theory, differentiation sounds great, as it takes several important factors of student learning into account: • It seeks to determine what students already know and what they still need to learn. • It allows students to demonstrate what they know through multiple methods. • It encourages students and teachers to add depth and complexity to the learning/teaching process.
  • Although fine in theory, differentiation in practice is harder to implement in a heterogeneous classroom than it is to juggle with one arm tied behind your back.
  • 'We couldn't answer the question ... because no one was actually differentiating,'
  • "In every case, differentiated instruction seemed to complicate teachers' work, requiring them to procure and assemble multiple sets of materials, … and it dumbed down instruction."
  • It seems that, when it comes to differentiation, teachers are either not doing it at all, or beating themselves up for not doing it as well as they're supposed to be doing it. Either way, the verdict is clear: Differentiation is a promise unfulfilled, a boondoggle of massive proportions.
  • The biggest reason differentiation doesn't work, and never will, is the way students are deployed in most of our nation's classrooms.
  • It seems to me that the only educators who assert that differentiation is doable are those who have never tried to implement it themselves: university professors, curriculum coordinators, and school principals.
  • Differentiation is a cheap way out for school districts to pay lip service to those who demand that each child be educated to his or her fullest potential.
  • Do we expect an oncologist to be able to treat glaucoma?
  • Do we expect a criminal prosecutor to be able to decipher patent law?
  • Do we expect a concert pianist to be able to play the clarinet equally well?
  • No, no, no.
  • However, when the education of our nation's young people is at stake, we toss together into one classroom every possible learning strength and disability and expect a single teacher to be able to work academic miracles with every kid … as long as said teacher is willing to differentiate, of course.
  • A second reason that differentiation has been a failure is that we're not exactly sure what it is we are differentiating: Is it the curriculum or the instructional methods used to deliver it? Or both?
  • The terms "differentiated instruction" and "differentiated curriculum" are used interchangeably, yet they are not synonyms.
  • Differentiation might have a chance to work if we are willing, as a nation, to return to the days when students of similar abilities were placed in classes with other students whose learning needs paralleled their own. Until that time, differentiation will continue to be what it has become: a losing proposition for both students and teachers, and yet one more panacea that did not pan out.
Troy Patterson

Experts Say Measuring Non-Cognitive Skills Won't Work, But Districts Still Try | MindSh... - 0 views

ww2.kqed.org/...t-work-but-districts-still-try

studentinvolvement msm324

shared by Troy Patterson on 03 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Federal education law now requires one non-academic measure of school progress, which has led some districts to consider including students’ social and emotional growth as a performance measure.
  • She writes that even the researchers who popularized terms like “grit” think using it to measure school effectiveness is a bad idea:
Shawn McGirr

Three Ring | An App for Teachers to Create Educational Portfolios of Student Work with ... - 1 views

threering.com

shared by Shawn McGirr on 10 May 12 - No Cached
  • Shawn McGirr on 10 May 12
     
    You can pull up a student's work for parent-teacher conferences, administrative meetings, formative assessment, or use as exemplars. How it works: With your smartphone, you can take a photo and tag it before you upload it. Take a picture while in class or grading.
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.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • 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

Adventures in Blended Learning: Why Universities aren't Dead....and Won't Be - 0 views

teachingwithoutpants.blogspot.com/...ies-arent-deadand-wont-be.html

msm308 libraries education

shared by Troy Patterson on 08 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • We will need to accept that we have to teach in ways that we ourselves were never taught.  We will have to work on shifting from a model of content delivery to a serious emphasis on mentoring students on how to learn. 
  • We have to do the hard work of teaching them how to work with that content, how to develop a set of learning behaviors that are transferable to everything they do.
Ron King

John Hattie - Visible Learning - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

shared by Ron King on 13 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 13 Mar 13
     
    Part 1 of edited highlights of a talk given by John Hattie who has led a team at Auckland University, New Zealand which compares the effect on learning of over 100 classroom interventions. This section looks at methods with negative, or very low effect sizes. Hattie points out that most educational debate is about things which do not really work well
Ron King

In Common Core, Teachers See Interdisciplinary Opportunities - 0 views

www.edweek.org/...o_interdisciplinary_units.html

shared by Ron King on 20 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 20 Mar 13
     
    Educators around the country are exploring innovative ways to teach the new common-core literacy standards, and some are calling attention to an approach they say is working well: interdisciplinary thematic units.
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

Want to Improve Teaching? Listen to Students - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...prove-teaching-_b_3342521.html

shared by Ron King on 29 May 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 29 May 13
     
    Annie Emerson doesn't have to wonder about what it takes to help her kindergarten students learn how to write or do math. They've told her. Several times during the year, the Pinewoods Elementary School teacher asks her students two basic questions: what are ways that I teach you that you like or that are really working for you? What could be changed to help you learn even more? And it turns out even 5-year-olds have plenty to say.
Ron King

Ethical & Effective Ways to Prepare Students for Testing (MiddleWeb) - 0 views

www.middleweb.com/...ethical-effective-test-prep

shared by Ron King on 13 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 13 Apr 13
     
    "So much rides on the results of standardized tests these days. They're even talking about making student scores worth 50 percent of my own evaluation and using them to determine my pay! I don't want to spend weeks "drilling and killing" my students with test-prep work sheets. What am I supposed to do?" - A teacher's question
Ron King

Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) - 0 views

www.parcconline.org

shared by Ron King on 23 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 23 Apr 13
     
    PARCC is a 22-state consortium working together to develop next-generation K-12 assessments in English and math.
Ron King

Standards-Based Grading Videos - 0 views

SBGVideos.org

shared by Ron King on 29 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 29 Apr 13
     
    Many of the videos on this site are a culmination of the work of practitioners who led breakout sessions at a standards-based grading conference held April 24, 2013 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. This website is organized around three themes: SBG 101: videos designed classroom practitioners who are getting started with standards-based grading. Discipline-specific: math, science, social studies, language arts, visual arts, career & technical education videos Leadership/Change: videos for administrators and leadership teams.
Ron King

Malcolm Gladwell: Albert O. Hirschman and the Power of Failure : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...130624crbo_books_gladwell

shared by Ron King on 22 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 22 Jun 13
     
    In the mid-nineteenth century, work began on a crucial section of the railway line connecting Boston to the Hudson River. The addition would run from Greenfield, Massachusetts, to Troy, New York, and it required tunnelling through Hoosac Mountain, a massive impediment, nearly five miles thick, that blocked passage between the Deerfield Valley and a tributary of the Hudson.
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.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • 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

Activity: Feedback Action Planning Template | - 0 views

blog.williamferriter.com/...dback-action-planning-template

msm326 feedback

shared by Troy Patterson on 02 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Troy Patterson on 02 Apr 16
     
    "I've been doing a ton of tinkering this year with the way that I give students feedback in my classroom.  My goal is to steal Dylan Wiliam's idea that our goal should be to turn feedback into detective work.  That just feels right to me."
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