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Tony Richards

The Atlantic Online | January/February 2010 | What Makes a Great Teacher? | Amanda Ripley - 0 views

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    "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
Rhondda Powling

Initial findings | Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership - 0 views

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    "ITSL, in collaboration with the Centre of Program Evaluation at the University of Melbourne are conducting a three-year process and impact evaluation of the implementation of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. The purpose of the Evaluation is to assess the usefulness, effectiveness and impact of the Standards on improving teacher quality. Over 6,002 respondents including teachers, school leaders, pre-service teachers and teacher educators participated in the 2013 National Survey. Initial analysis from the survey highlights the key findings below."
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    "ITSL, in collaboration with the Centre of Program Evaluation at the University of Melbourne are conducting a three-year process and impact evaluation of the implementation of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. The purpose of the Evaluation is to assess the usefulness, effectiveness and impact of the Standards on improving teacher quality. Over 6,002 respondents including teachers, school leaders, pre-service teachers and teacher educators participated in the 2013 National Survey. Initial analysis from the survey highlights the key findings below."
Rhondda Powling

Reading Australia - Home - 2 views

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    Reading Australia has been developed by the Copyright Agency and aims to make significant Australian literary works more readily available for teaching in schools and universities. These works are supplemented with online teacher resources and essays by popular authors about the enduring relevance of the works. There is a list of titles (download as a PDF). These titles have been selected by the Australian Society of Authors' (ASA) Council. They were asked to select works they thought students and others should encounter, to give a view of Australia's rich cultural identity: works that would tell Australia's history and also how we are currently developing as a nation. The ASA Council are adamant that this list should be merely the beginning, and it should be built upon with other works that have already been published, as well as the great new works that continue to be published in Australia. There is a wide range of teacher resources available (PDF) for Primary and Secondary school teachers and all of these teacher resources include classroom activities, assessments and links to the Australian Curriculum. In addition, many of the Secondary resources include an introductory essay on the text written by high profile writers. The Primary level resources have been commissioned by the Primary English Teaching Association of Australia and the Australian Literacy Educators' Association, and the resources for Secondary level have been jointly commissioned by the Australian Association for the Teaching of English and the English Teachers Association NSW."
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    Reading Australia has been developed by the Copyright Agency and aims to make significant Australian literary works more readily available for teaching in schools and universities. These works are supplemented with online teacher resources and essays by popular authors about the enduring relevance of the works. There is a list of titles (download as a PDF). These titles have been selected by the Australian Society of Authors' (ASA) Council. They were asked to select works they thought students and others should encounter, to give a view of Australia's rich cultural identity: works that would tell Australia's history and also how we are currently developing as a nation. The ASA Council are adamant that this list should be merely the beginning, and it should be built upon with other works that have already been published, as well as the great new works that continue to be published in Australia. There is a wide range of teacher resources available (PDF) for Primary and Secondary school teachers and all of these teacher resources include classroom activities, assessments and links to the Australian Curriculum. In addition, many of the Secondary resources include an introductory essay on the text written by high profile writers. The Primary level resources have been commissioned by the Primary English Teaching Association of Australia and the Australian Literacy Educators' Association, and the resources for Secondary level have been jointly commissioned by the Australian Association for the Teaching of English and the English Teachers Association NSW."
Tony Searl

In Defense of Public School Teachers in a Time of Crisis - Henry Giroux | Paulo Freire,... - 2 views

  • Yet, teachers are being deskilled, unceremoniously removed from the process of school governance, largely reduced to technicians or subordinated to the authority of security guards. Underlying these transformations are a number of forces eager to privatize schools, substitute vocational training for education and reduce teaching and learning to reductive modes of testing and evaluation.
  • Teachers are no longer asked to think critically and be creative in the classroom.
  • Put bluntly, knowledge that can't be measured is viewed as irrelevant, and teachers who refuse to implement a standardized curriculum and evaluate young people through objective measures of assessments are judged as incompetent or disrespectful
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  • teachers are increasingly removed from dealing with children as part of a broader historical, social and cultural context.
  • Removed from the normative and pedagogical framing of classroom life, teachers no longer have the option to think outside of the box, to experiment, be poetic or inspire joy in their students. School has become a form of dead time, designed to kill the imagination of both teachers and students
  • Under this bill, the quality of teaching and the worth of a teacher are solely determined by student test scores on standardized tests.
  • Moreover, advanced degrees and professional credentials would now become meaningless in determining a teacher's salary.
  • In other words, teaching was always directive in its attempt to shape students as particular agents and offer them a particular understanding of the present and the future.
  • Rather than viewed as disinterested technicians, teachers should be viewed as engaged intellectuals, willing to construct the classroom conditions that provide the knowledge, skills and culture of questioning necessary for students to participate in critical dialogue with the past, question authority, struggle with ongoing relations of power and prepare themselves for what it means to be active and engaged citizens in the interrelated local, national and global public spheres.
  • fosters rather than mandates
  • respects the time and conditions teachers need to prepare lessons, research, cooperate with each other and engage valuable community resources.
  • In part, this requires pedagogical practices that connect the space of language, culture and identity to their deployment in larger physical and social spaces. Such pedagogical practices are based on the presupposition that it is not enough to teach students how to read the word and knowledge critically. They most also learn how to act on their beliefs, reflect on their role as engaged citizens and intervene in the world as part of the obligation of what it means to be a socially responsible agent.
  • As the late Pierre Bourdieu argued, the "power of the dominant order is not just economic, but intellectual - lying in the realm of beliefs," and it is precisely within the domain of ideas that a sense of utopian possibility can be restored to the public realm
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    teachers are being deskilled, unceremoniously removed from the process of school governance, largely reduced to technicians or subordinated to the authority of security guards. Underlying these transformations are a number of forces eager to privatize schools, substitute vocational training for education and reduce teaching and learning to reductive modes of testing and evaluation.
Tony Searl

NZ Interface Magazine | If you can't use technology get out of teaching! - 12 views

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    Is a lack of PD a barrier? Professional development is a barrier, although I think they can teach themselves much of what teachers need to be learning to be able to modernise their classrooms. The worst thing a teacher can say is: "who's going to teach me how to do that?" Teachers are teachers and should be able to teach themselves what they need to know. If they can't then they probably shouldn't be teaching. You want a teacher who can keep up. There are networks of other educators out there that can connect you with new skills. Professional development doesn't have to be something that is done to teachers - it can be just ongoing conversations they're having with other professionals that they're learning from every day.
John Pearce

100 Free Online Lectures that Will Make You a Better Teacher - 0 views

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    "Great teachers know that learning doesn't stop as soon as you graduate from college. Teachers learn from their experience, from their colleagues, from their students, and any number of other resources. If you are a teacher looking for ways to expand your knowledge base, here are 100 free lectures you can watch to help facilitate some of that learning." This great collection of some of the best recent lectures has been selected by Heidi Taylor. It contains sections on Creative Learning Environments, Technology, Information for New Teachers, Information for All Teachers, Teaching Specific Subjects, Special Needs, Arts, PE & Health and Lectures From Influential Professors. This is the perfect site for a rainy afternoon.
Tony Searl

Public high school teachers to get wireless laptops - plus 20,000 more computers for pr... - 0 views

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    The roll-out will begin this year (2009) with all public high school teachers having a laptop by 2012. The roll-out to teachers complements the laptop program for the state's 197,000 senior high school students. It means that students and teachers will use the same type of laptop, giving teachers compatibility in planning and delivering lessons electronically. The Department of Education and Training is currently assessing tender submissions for the supply of laptops in NSW public high schools. It expects to award a contract by the end of February 2009. As part of the $44 million package, primary schools will receive 20,000 more computers over four years. This will provide students and teachers with access to the most up-to-date technology in the early school years.
John Pearce

FUSE - Department of Education and Early Childhood Development - 5 views

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    The Victorian DEECD portal to high quality teaching and learning resources for schools. It enables teachers to Find, Use and Share Education resources. It is open to all teachers anywhere in the world and is located at www.education.vic.gov.au/teacher. It is free to use and managed by the Victorian Education Department. FUSE connects teachers to resources from across the world, Connect, Digilearn, Knowledgebank, the Learning Federation content and thousands of web resources recommended by Victorian teachers. In addition, it contains new resources provided by trusted education partners such as National Gallery of Victoria, the State Library, Museum Victoria, and Zoos Victoria. There are also access pages for students and early childhood children.
Kerry J

The Trouble with Formative Assessment - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher - 5 views

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    Formative Assessment, assessing student performance routinely as instruction unfolds can transform teaching and learning. Writer actively experimented with giving more feedback to my students, using rubrics, models of student work, and having students assess their own work as well as that of their peers. Problem is Baltimore County school administrators have ordered all teachers to begin using a grading system next month that will require them to judge whether each of their students has mastered more than 100 specific skills. Elementary school teachers have classes of 25 kids while highschool teachers can have more than 100 students. Over the course of a year, many teachers would have to make as many as 10,000 marks indicating whether a child had learned a task.
Rhondda Powling

http://www.unescobkk.org/education/ict/online-resources/databases/ict-in-education-data... - 3 views

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    An updated publication designed to help training teachers on ways to optimize the use of information and communication technologies in the classroom has been launched early November 2011 by UNESCO in cooperation with the Commonwealth of Learning, Intel and Microsoft. The ICT Competency Framework for Teachers aims at helping countries to develop comprehensive national teacher ICT competency policies and standards, and should be seen as an important component of an overall ICT in Education Master Plan.
Tony Searl

http://www.onlinecourses.org/2009/09/13/100-best-blogs-for-tech-savvy-teachers/ - 7 views

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    While there are still some educators who dispute the importance of technology in the classroom, there is no dispute over the fact that technology is here to stay in schools. Whether you are one of those tech-savvy teachers who can't get enough of technology news and ideas or you are a teacher just learning to embrace technology in the classroom, these blogs offer a wealth of information straight from teachers and other professionals in the education field themselves.
John Pearce

Critical Thinking | TechNyou - 3 views

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    Critical thinking is a difficult concept to define in clear, objective terms. This can make it a challenging objective for teachers to implement and assess. The aim of this resource is to provide teachers with some tools to help clarify and communicate what critical thinking is and how it might be implemented as a teaching method.  This resource includes materials that can help teachers to engage their classes in critical thinking. The materials have been written with year 9 and year 10 students in mind, yet can easily be differentiated for students in years 8 and 11. The critical thinking introduction addresses what critical thinking is, where is applies in the curriculum and how to teach it. The teachers guide provides an overview of this resource in relation to the accompanying PowerPoint presentation.
John Pearce

Why Twitter could hold the secret to better #CPD | tesconnect - 2 views

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    "Get your hashtags ready: Twitter is a far more effective source of CPD than more traditional approaches, research has found. Indeed, teachers believe they derive more from the 140 characters of a tweet than they do from several hours of seminars or lectures. Academics from two US universities surveyed 755 members of school staff about Twitter. They found that the most popular use of the social media website was for CPD, with many praising Twitter's advantages over more traditional methods. Twitter, many teachers told researchers, allowed them to create a virtual staffroom, filled entirely with their own choice of colleagues. Indeed, a middle school English teacher explained: "I have learned so much from other teachers. It has transformed my teaching. And this is my 18th year [in the profession].""
John Pearce

EdmodoTeacherHub - 4 views

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    "A Community of Practice for teachers using edmodo. Work in Progress" This Wikispace from teachers in NSW covers About Best Practices edmodo and school safety edmodo for Student Voice Independent Schools NSW DEC Topics Parents Resource List School Directory School Policy School Subdomains Selling edmodo Teacher Stories Teacher Topics The edmodo FAQ Use Edmodo - Primary School Using Edmodo - General Using Edmodo - High School Using Edmodo - Special Needs
Roland Gesthuizen

Teacher pay: broken promises and falling standards - The Drum Opinion - The inconvenien... - 2 views

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    Today, thousands of public school teachers are on strike after the Victorian Government reneged on its election promise to substantially increase their salaries. The inconvenience to families is regrettable, but the reality is that attacks on teachers' working conditions ultimately hurt students.
Alison Hall

Teachers' Toolkit - 1 views

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    Teachers' Toolkit is a quarterly magazine, delivered free to teachers in every school around Australia, combines with this website and the regular delivery of the e-newsletter to support teachers plan and expand their classroom programs
Tony Searl

Turning Children into Data - 4 views

  • The teachers understood that learning doesn’t have to be measured in order to be assessed. 
  • It focused on teachers’ personal “connection[s] with our subject area” as the basis for helping students to think “like mathematicians or historians or writers or scientists, instead of drilling them in the vocabulary of those subject areas or breaking down the skills.”  In a word, the teachers put kids before data.
  • All that does is corrupt the measure (unless it’s a test score, in which case it’s already misleading), undermine collaboration among teachers, and make teaching less joyful and therefore less effective by meaningful criteria.
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  • kids should have a lot to say about their assessment.
  • we want to create an environment where students can “experience success and failure not as reward and punishment but as information."  
  • students’ desire to learn?
  • The more that students are led to focus on how well they're doing, the less engaged they tend to become with what they're doing. 
  • A school that’s all about achievement and performance is a school that’s not really about discovery and understanding.
  • teachers’ isolation, fatalism, and fear (of demands by clueless officials to raise test scores at any cost).
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    "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."
Rhondda Powling

Apps in Education: Apps 4 Teachers - 6 views

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    "Most of what we do is for the students. The focus of this and many other blogs and websites is about learning, and rightly so, but there are also apps that will make our jobs easier too. I am talking about that catergory of apps that are designed specifically for the classroom teacher. There are plenty and I am sure as more and more teachers gain the confidence to design their own apps, there will be more suitable one to come. Here is a list of apps that you can use to make your job easier."
Kerry J

Teacher Magazine: PD Pet Peeves: Teachers Misbehaving - 0 views

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    Teachers have no time to waste on unproductive or unnecessary professional development activities. But what about those times when the professional development is good, but the professional behavior in the room isn't? During a discussion about the highs and lows of professional training, educators in the Teacher Leaders Network shared some of their "PD pet peeves." A chief target of their criticism: their own colleagues.
John Pearce

Free Technology for Teachers: Backup plans - some tips for teachers (guest post) - 1 views

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    "Every teacher is taught that back up plans are a must. Things change constantly in education and there are a variety of factors that can make plans change - computer breaks, internet goes out, file is corrupted, forgot your flash drive at home, you finish a lesson early with a class, your class has very low attendance due to a school activity or event (like AP testing, prom, etc), lesson runs long, students don't understand the material, class is interrupted by a fire drill. To deal with these issues, teachers must have back up plans ready to go and be flexible and organized. Here are some tips and resources for backup plans."
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