"What Makes a Great Teacher?
Image credit: Veronika Lukasova
Also in our Special Report:
National: "How America Can Rise Again"
Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke.
Video: "One Nation, On Edge"
James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths.
Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..."
... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown
Chart: "The Happiness Index"
Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller
On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math.
One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked.
The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so.
Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work
(Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org)
At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one).
After a year in Mr. Taylo
This article responds to a generation of techno-criticism in education. It contains a review of the key themes of that criticism. The context of previous efforts to reform education reframes that criticism. Within that context, the question is raised about what schools need to look and be like in order to take advantage of laptop computers and other technology. In doing so, the article presents a vision for self-organizing schools.
This is a student-centered narrative of systemic change. It is a narrative which understands the fundamental issues facing our students. A narrative which understands, in the words of the Sacramento (CA) schools, that "there is no magic bullet to our problems, no easy answers. But collectively and collaboratively, I believe we have enough power to change the lives of the children we serve."
Reformers have largely worked within, rather than on, the system of education. Working within the system has resulted in status-quo preservation, even when reformists felt they were being radical. Illich failed to account for how educational institutions are integrated into society. Freire spoke with a humanity and hope that was largely overlooked by a comfortable developed world incapable of seeing the structure and impact of its system. To create and nurture change, a message must not only be true for an era, but it must also resonate with the needs, passions, interests, realities, and hopes of the audience to whom the message is directed.
"Victoria is expected to receive a quarter of the additional $6.5 billion a year to be spent on schools under the Gillard government's funding reforms - four times what the Baillieu government is offering in its alternative plan."
The Creativity Post is a non-profit web platform committed to sharing the very best content on creativity, in all of its forms: from scientific discovery to philosophical debate, from entrepreneurial ventures to educational reform, from artistic expression to technological innovation - in short, to all the varieties of the human experience that creativity brings to life.
"The Compact: Roles and responsibilities in Victorian government school education (the Compact) was developed in support of the Victorian Government's school education reform agenda"
"On 5 June 2013, the Australian Law Reform Commission released a Discussion Paper for its Copyright and the Digital Economy inquiry. The closing date for submissions is 31 July 2013."
In education, too, the impact of policy borrowing is far less immediate or impressive. For those who work in classrooms and schools, the inconvenient truth is that the real benefits of borrowing from the best are not always visible or tangible.
Policies can be easily borrowed, but the processes of implementation that make them work in context largely cannot
*Take effective design principles rather than entire policies, and develop new approaches based on these. *Develop such approaches in context by drawing heavily upon the good and effective practice that already resides within the system. *Put in place high-quality implementation processes so that the impact of any new approach will be maximized. *Invest in continued adaptation and refinement of any new initiative or intervention to ensure a close cultural and contextual fit.
A post from Alma Harris, Yong Zhao and Michelle Jones on the importance of developing contextual solutions. A reminder why things like IOI Process and the Modern Learning Canvas are so important as they offer a method for developing unique solutions.
Creativity in designing schools. "When people talk about how hard it is to change our public schools, they're usually referring to curriculum reform or employment contracts. But there's another area where change is difficult: design. When a proposed school building doesn't look exactly like what folks think a school should look like, officials freeze. "
"New Technology Foundation (NTF)™ was established in 1999 as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization working to achieve national education reform with schools that desire to model the Napa New Technology High School™."
In a time where much of the debate around education is linked to performance on national and international assessments such as PISA, TIMMS, PIRLS and in Australia, NAPLAN combined with calls for market-driven reforms there is a danger that a climate of competition between schools and systems will grow.
As these systems evolve, the number of inputs and outputs generally increases.
Each time a new node is added to the network, the number of potential
connections required scales exponentially
Furthermore, because there is only one standard, there is no incentive for
innovation, which means that the system cannot evolve.
Single standards are notoriously difficult to overcome or dislodge, even when
they become ludicrously inefficient, as is the case with the Western “QWERTY”
keyboard layout.
the system has great difficulty overcoming its own internal structure and
adapting to the change.
Complex systems of this type, that are too loosely structurally coupled,
maximize their openness to innovation but do so entirely at the cost of being
able to exploit those innovations when they are useful
a panarchy
The bow-tie structure manages these tensions by occupying an “edge of chaos”
zone in between too much rigidity and too much flexibility, between too little
diversity, and too much.
There is a need to capitalize on potential efficiencies in one’s current
environment while at the same time remaining flexible enough to adapt if the
environment changes
confusing the necessary cluster of evolving core elements with a “standard
Future networks operate on multiple standards in the core — optimal levels of
infrastructure arrived at by open innovation in the periphery that makes its way
into the core as adoption and usage increase.
widely agreed upon cultural understandings and practices.
Anna Patty can you please link to your sources so SMH readers can read full transcripts of ideas you selectively quote? Poor journalism in a hyper-linked age. These ideas are NOT new, so why do they gain prominance once one GPC Pricipal obviously published their thoughts somewhere?