Group items tagged

"While some education conferences are genuinely inspiring, others serve mostly to demonstrate how even intelligent educators can be remarkably credulous, nodding agreeably at descriptions of programs that ought to elicit fury or laughter, avidly copying down hollow phrases from a consultant's PowerPoint presentation, awed by anything that's borrowed from the business world or involves digital technology. Many companies and consultants thrive on this credulity, and also on teachers' isolation, fatalism, and fear (of demands by clueless officials to raise test scores at any cost). With a good dose of critical thinking and courage, a willingness to say "This is bad for kids and we won't have any part of it," we could drive these outfits out of business -- and begin to take back our schools."

"In conjuction with our partners in the Rethink Learning Now campaign, we have produced an ESEA Toolkit for you to use in making your voice heard around ESEA reauthorization."

IMAGINE AN assessment system in which teachers had a wide repertoire of classroom-based, culturally sensitive assessment practices and tools to use in helping each and every child learn to high standards; in which educators collaboratively used assessment information to continuously improve schools; in which important decisions about a student, such as readiness to graduate from high school, were based on the work done over the years by the student; in which schools in networks held one another accountable for student learning; and in which public evidence of student achievement consisted primarily of samples from students' actual schoolwork rather than just reports of results from one-shot examinations.

This is an excellent overview of OBE and also how its principles are compromised when trying to incorporate it with existing education systems

Learning is Change. It is upheaval. It is revolution. Every time that we learn something new, it challenges our assumptions, it provokes us to act. Our

Has relevance for the Australian audience too

Debunking the Case for National Standards One-Size-Fits-All Mandates and Their Dangers

A more likely cause is the autonomous, idiosyncratic, non-collaborative, and non-differentiated teaching practices that largely remain uninformed by research about what it takes to significantly improve student learning and achievement

Better we make the wise decision than the expedient one. Read the older educators... Read Ted Sizer and Deborah Meier and Herb Kohl... and feel the wisdom in their words. They write without hubris, but instead with an acknowledgment of their own flawed humanity. They write with an understand that they cannot be all things to all children, but with the knowledge that they must come as close as they can. I am far from religious, but I am reminded a lot these days of the serenity prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

This is by far the best-educated cohort in our history - on paper, anyway - but apparently lacking in courage, judgment, capacity to analyse or even simple curiosity, except about immediate personal needs.

MU Assessment project