Group items tagged

"n the previous literacy post I identified a few take-away questions and related issues from my recent research on comprehension, and looked at some tips related to the 1st question: Do students understand the real point of academic reading? Do students understand that the aim of instruction is transfer of learning? Am I using the right texts for making clear the value of strategies? Do students understand the difference between self-monitoring understanding and knowing what they might do when understanding does not occur? Am I attending to the fewest, most powerful comprehension strategies for academic literacy? Am I helping them build a flexible repertoire instead of teaching strategies in isolation? Do students have sufficient general understanding of the strategies (which is key to transfer)? Am I doing enough ongoing formal assessment of student comprehension, strategy use, and tolerance of ambiguity?"

"In the three previous posts on reading for understanding (here, here, and here) I looked at the general question: What can we say for sure (or not) in research on comprehension in reading? Here, I take a closer look at comprehension strategies and what the research does and doesn't say. In general, it supports many of the blunt comments I made here and here a few years ago: there is still a lack of clarity about what the right strategies are, how to teach them, and which ones work for older students (my focus in these current posts)."

"Yes, reading strategies - and explicit teaching of them - make a considerable difference, as my previous four blog posts here, here, here, and here make clear. And there is much to like about the idea of the gradual release of (teacher) responsibility in the teaching of those strategies for reading - or anything else where we want skillfulness. The approach is interactive, empowering for kids, easy for most teachers to grasp and implement, and grounded in research."

"As the first phase of bringing closure to these blog posts on literacy at the secondary level, I want to offer a tentative list of recommendations that I believe follow from all the research cited in the previous posts. I will say more about each principle in follow-up posts, as well as offering brief bibliographic and graphic-organizer resources in support of each idea. (I offer some initial thoughts on Principle #1, below)."

"It looks to me as if one of the most acclaimed reforms of today's education profession-not just in the U.S. but also all over the planet-is one of the least examined in terms of actual implementation and effectiveness. How often and how well do instructors, whose administrators and gurus revere the concept of differentiated instruction, actually carry it out? How well does it work and for which kids under what circumstances? So far as I can tell, nobody really knows. I've been roaming the globe in search of effective strategies for educating high-ability youngsters, particularly kids from disadvantaged circumstances who rarely have parents with the knowledge and means to steer them through the education maze and obtain the kind of schooling (and/or supplementation or acceleration) that will make the most of their above-average capacity to learn. As expected, I've found a wide array of programs and policies intended for "gifted education," "talent development," and so forth, each with pluses and minuses."

"As I begin my tenth year as superintendent, I take stock of the significant changes that have occurred in my school district. As Pascal Finette says, social media have turned the world into a participation culture linked by a global communication network. And mobile devices, with 500 times the computing power that put astronauts on the moon, rest in the hands, pockets, and backpacks of children, not just top executives. Smart technologies have moved onto some college campuses, and students now receive texts telling them when washers are open for laundry. No longer science fiction, driverless vehicles represent real stories in our daily newsfeeds."

"This blog is another in the series devoted to proposing reforms in the American education system based on the strategies that the countries with the most successful education systems in the world have been using. In this blog, I address the reforms that are needed in the initial preparation of teachers. Almost two years ago, our Center for International Education Benchmarking gave Linda Darling-Hammond and a global team of researchers she assembled a large grant to do a multi-year international comparative study of teacher quality. The issue of initial teacher preparation is one of the topics addressed in that study. The research for the teacher quality study has been done, and the analysis is in progress. The results should be available in a few months. The conclusions and proposals in this blog draw on research we and other scholars have done, including other research done by Professor Darling-Hammond, but not in the forthcoming book. "

"In the fall of 2006, Clarence R. Edwards Middle School ("the Edwards" as it is known locally within Boston Public Schools) became one of the first schools in the state of Massachusetts to implement the Expanded Learning Time (ELT) Initiative. The reasons why were simple: we were not making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and we wanted to make significant academic gains with our students. As it turned out, making our school day longer was one of the best things we could have done to help reform our school model and improve student outcomes. Our statewide exam scores, student enrollment, daily student attendance rate, community and family engagement, and time for team teaching/collaboration all improved as a result of ELT. "

"The Navigator tool is an online database that maps every lesson in the district's mathematics textbooks to the CCSSM. These linkages have been identified and reviewed by a team of CSC reviewers. This information is made available to teachers for their use in two ways: 1) textbook lessons are linked to the specific CCSSM standards addressed, and 2) any specific CCSSM standard is linked to all the textbook lessons that address it. This allows teachers to make informed decisions about which lessons to teach and in what sequence"

"A stack of research suggests that all the classroom technology in the world can't compare to the power of a great teacher. And, since we haven't yet figured out how to clone our best teachers, a few schools around the country are trying something like it: Stretching them across multiple classrooms. "We'll probably never fill up every single classroom with one of those teachers," says Bryan Hassel, founder of Charlotte-based education consulting firm Public Impact. But, he says, it's important to ask: "How can we change the way schools work so that the great teachers we do have can reach more of the students, maybe even all of them?""

"Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck has become something of a cult figure in education and parenting circles. Her research into boosting student motivation has spawned a mini industry of consultants, sold more than a million books and changed the way that many adults praise children."