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Troy Patterson

Differentiation Doesn't Work - Education Week - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • 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.
Ron King

10 Little-Known Twitter Tools For Connected Educators | Edudemic - Notlurking.com - 0 views

shared by Ron King on 01 Jul 13 - No Cached
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    There's an array of Twitter tools that make the rounds on the ol' edtech circle. We chat about Hootsuite, Paper.li, and Bit.ly quite a bit. But there are a lot of little-known Twitter tools that don't see the light of day on sites like Edudemic. So I thought this would be a good time to start fixing that. We're creating a series of helpful posts designed to turn you on to a few tools that you may not know about - but will be anxious to try once you learn about them.
Ron King

AAAS Science Assessment ~ Home - 3 views

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    The assessment items on this website are the result of more than a decade of research and development by Project 2061, a long-term science education reform initiative of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Ron King

Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) - 0 views

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    Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) is an independent, non-partisan research center based at Stanford University, the University of California - Berkeley, and the University of Southern California. PACE seeks to define and sustain a long-term strategy for comprehensive policy reform and continuous improvement in performance at all levels of California's education system, from early childhood to post-secondary education and training. PACE bridges the gap between research and policy, working with scholars from California's leading universities and with state and local policymakers to increase the impact of academic research on educational policy in California.
Ron King

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

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    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

What poor children need in school - 0 views

  • Most educational policy elites, whether in government or in the nonprofit sector, mean well.
  • Yet policymakers tend to come from a relatively privileged slice of American society.  And they tend to possess a set of beliefs and assumptions distinct to their background. 
  • But in most cases, the fact that decision-makers inhabit a different world from students—and particularly, poor students—is a matter of great significance.
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  • Poverty limits opportunity in all senses.  It restricts career paths, as policymakers recognize.  But it also denies young people equal time, resources, and exposure to discover their interests and foster their passions.  It constrains lives.
  • Schools, of course, did not create this problem.  But they do exacerbate it.  Over the past decade, well-intended policymakers concerned with closing the achievement gap have promoted policies and practices that reduce learning to something easily quantified.
  • Reformers need to understand that their narrow efforts to close the quantifiable “achievement gap” are creating another kind of educational inequity.  In other words, as they seek to close one gap they are opening up another.
  • Concerned only with the cultivation of ostensibly job-oriented knowledge and skills, they have neglected everything else that makes schools great. 
  • Our best schools are places where children gain confidence in themselves, build healthy relationships, and develop values congruent with their own self-interest.  They are places of play and laughter and discovery.
  • For contemporary education reformers, improving test scores is the only measure of school quality that matters.  And they have had some modest successes in this regard.  Yet they have merely reshuffled the deck. 
Troy Patterson

Homework: An unnecessary evil? … Surprising findings from new research - The Washington Post - 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.
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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

Official Google Enterprise Blog: A bridge to the cloud: Google Cloud Connect for MicrosOft Office now available to early testers - 0 views

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    "For those of you who have not made the full move to Google Docs and are still using Microsoft office, Google has something great to offer. With Cloud Connect, people can continue to use the familiar office interface, while reaping many of the benefits of web-based collaboration that Google Docs users already enjoy. Users of office 2003, 2007 and 2010 can sync their office documents to the Google cloud, without ever leaving office. Once synced, documents are backed-up, given a unique URL, and can be accessed from anywhere (including mobile devices) at any time through Google Docs. And because the files are stored in the cloud, people always have access to the current version."
Troy Patterson

How to Use Diigo's New Outlining Tool: Social Bookmarking Made Easy @coolcatteacher - 0 views

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    "One ream of paper is 6% of a tree! It is estimated that a page of paper costs 6 cents each in terms of waste."
Troy Patterson

10 Realities About Bullying at School and Online | MindShift | KQED News - 0 views

  • “most educators aren’t aware of the function bullying serves in school,”
  • The majority of kids don’t bully other kids and haven’t been victimized
  • Kids pick on others as a way to secure their standing among their peers or to move up a notch.
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  • aggression is intrinsic to status and escalates with increases in peer status until the pinnacle of the social hierarchy is attained.”
  • Children from single-parent homes, and those with less educated parents, are no more apt to bully than kids with married and learned parents. African-Americans and other minorities show the same rates of bullying as their white counterparts.
  • The popular notion of bullies as sullen social outcasts who come from broken homes is a myth.
  • What adults call bullying kids call drama.
  • Cyber-bullying is just an extension of what’s happening in the classrooms, halls, and cafeteria
  • online cruelty merely makes visible what kids are doing in person behind the backs of adults.
  • ust another way for kids to express hostility towards targets they’ve already gone after—or are in retaliation against those who have attacked them in school.
  • Kids don’t intervene because doing so would jeopardize their own standing, they lack the tools to assist, and because they don’t think it will help anyway.
  • Adolescents are fixated on their social standing, and anything that jeopardizes their fragile position will be avoided.
  • students receive scant training on how to help in such a way that it won’t backfire.
  • “Asking students to be empowered and responsible bystanders is tantamount to telling them to be good readers or safe drivers without giving them instructions, guidance, and opportunities to practice,”
Ron King

John Hattie - Visible Learning - 0 views

shared by Ron King on 13 Mar 13 - No Cached
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    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

John Hattie - Visible Learning - 0 views

shared by Ron King on 13 Mar 13 - No Cached
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    Edited highlights of a talk by John Hattie where he outlines some of the most successful methods to promote learning. To join a network of teachers who aim to put evidence into practice, visit www.ebtn.org.uk For training sessions by Mike Bell in the UK on evidence-based classroom methods visit www.educationevidence.com or contact mikebell@educationevidence.com For training in John Hattie's 'Visible Learning Plus': In the UK: Osiris Educational www.osiriseducational.co.uk In the USA: Lead and Learn www.leadandlearn.com In Scandinavia: JN Partnership www.challenginglearning.com In Australia: Macmillan Professional Learning www.macmillanprofessionallearning.com.au
Ron King

Standards Based Grading: District-Wide Journey - 1 views

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    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

CCSS Toolbox - 1 views

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    T he Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM), the product of a major, multiyear state-led initiative coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School officers (CCSSO), present an extraordinary opportunity for districts across the country to move to higher levels of achievement for all students. These rigorous standards will require that districts reexamine what it means for all students to understand and to do mathematics in ways that prepare them for success in a rapidly changing world.
Ron King

Standards-Based Grading Videos - 0 views

shared by Ron King on 29 Apr 13 - No Cached
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    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

Explanations are not enough, we need questions - physicsfocus.org - 1 views

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    I recently read a popular science book on a topic that I felt I needed to learn more about. The book was well written, ideas were clearly explained, and I finished the book knowing a lot more about the history of the subject than beforehand. However, I don't feel I understand the key ideas in the book any better. I won't mention the name of the book or the author because this post isn't really about that specific book. It's about how I feel books of this nature often fail to deliver on what they implicitly promise: that you will understand the science contained within their pages.
Ron King

No-Zero Policy: Students Don't See Zeroes The Same Way Adults Do - 0 views

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    Many teachers see zeroes as punitive, but teaching 11th Grade English has taught me that the least motivational force on the planet is a zero. Though many teachers would chaff under the prospect of a zero, many students simply shrug their shoulders, roll their eyes and say, "Whatev." This can be very frustrating for teachers and parents, and worst of all doesn't support the learning process. Which might suggest a new kind of no-zero policy.
Ron King

How to Apply Design Thinking in Class, Step By Step | MindShift - 0 views

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    or educators ready to try the idea of design thinking, you'll be glad to know it does not require extensive transformation of your classroom. That said, it can be a transformative experience for all involved. Here, we try to answer your questions about integrating different components of a design learning experience into familiar, pre-existing scenarios that play out in every school.
Troy Patterson

Why Aren't There More Podcasts for Kids? - The Atlantic - 2 views

  • “A podcast aimed at 3-10-year-olds that parents could actually tolerate—if you could do it right—would be an unbelievable hit,”
  • NPR saw a 75 percent increase in podcast downloads
  • while adults and teens could easily fill their waking hours with audio, kids would struggle to fill a few.
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  • The absence of images in podcasts seems to be a source of their creative potential. Without visuals, listeners are required to fill the gaps—and when these listeners are children, the results can be powerful.
  • Not only are children listening and responding creatively, observations suggest they’re also learning.
  • When it comes to using public radio in the classroom, Brady-Myerov believes three-to-five-minute segments are most effective, leaving the teacher significant time to build a lesson around the audio.
  • That said, a number of schools have already begun incorporating longer podcasts into their curricula, to great success.
  • high-school teachers in California, Connecticut, Chicago, and a handful of other states have been using Radiolab, This American Life, StoryCorps, and, overwhelmingly, Serial.
  • TeachersPayTeachers.com (a site where educators can purchase lesson plans) saw a 21 percent increase in downloads of plans related to podcasts in 2014, and a 650 percent increase in 2015.
  • Research further supports the benefits of audio learning for children. When words are spoken aloud, kids can understand and engage with ideas that are two to three grade-levels higher than their reading level would normally allow.
  • Aural learning is particularly helpful for students who have dyslexia, are blind, or for whom English is their second language, who might struggle with reading or find it helpful to follow a transcript while listening.
Troy Patterson

Learning Myths And Realities From Brain Science : NPR Ed : NPR - 0 views

  • The idea that individuals have different learning styles, such as auditory or kinesthetic, is a pernicious myth. Boser compares it to the flat-earth myth — highly intuitive, but wrong.
  • Almost 90 percent of respondents agreed that simply re-reading material is "highly effective" for learning. Research suggests the opposite.
  • On the topic of "growth mindset," more than one-quarter of respondents believed intelligence is "fixed at birth". Neuroscience says otherwise.
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  • Nearly 60 percent argued that quizzes are not an effective way to gain new skills and knowledge. In fact, quizzing yourself on something you've just read is a great example of active learning, the best way to learn.
  • More than 40 percent of respondents believed that teachers don't need to know a subject area such as math or science, as long as they have good instructional skills. In fact, research shows that deep subject matter expertise is a key element in helping teachers excel.
  • "Parents' opinions are important, but teaching is a real craft," Boser says. "A lot of science goes into it. And we need to do more to respect that."
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