Group items tagged

At Exeter, I learned that what you said was more important than what you knew. I learned that the louder you are, the better you are. I learned that there's only one way to learn anything, and that's to talk in circles until someone takes notice.

1. Tardy passes.  The picture below represents all of the tardy passes I have received all semester, along with passes to the nurse and passes to assistant principals for discipline.  That stack represents a lot of lost learning time, especially when you realize that these passes are written for a lot of the same students over and over again.  If learning was really valued, there would be preventative action taken rather then just letting students be late and lose valuable learning time.

2. Announcements during class time.  For the first four years of my teaching career, I worked in a district where it was in the contract that no announcements could be made during class time other than regularly scheduled announcements during a set period.  Consequently I started teaching not knowing the agony of having my class interrupted with announcements about homecoming, meetings, or sports cancellations, and then having student attention diverted to those topics rather than what they are supposed to learn.  I always hear about cell phones being a distraction to students, but random announcements that could have waited until another time (or be made in another way) during a class can be just as much of a distraction from the real reason students are in the building. 3. Letting students talk among themselves for the last 5 minutes of class.  I am known as the strict teacher because I believe in bell-to-bell instruction.  I only have 50 minutes a day to cause understanding in my students, and I want to use all of that time.  Some students and some teachers find this unreasonable of me.4. Pulling students out of class for things that are non-learning related.  This school year alone I had students pulled out of class to talk about sports participation opportunities and to do something for an extra-curricular activity that was supposed to be done after school.  I even had a student pulled out of my class during a test because another teacher simply demanded it.  Now, I'm not against sports or extra-curricular activities; I feel they are a valuable part of a student's school experience.  It's when they start to take priority over learning that I have a problem.

Finland's schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA survey, conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore. In the most recent survey in 2009 Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai, China, taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very top. Throughout the same period, the PISA performance of the United States has been middling, at best.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of foreign delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit schools and talk with the nation's education experts, and constant coverage in the worldwide media marveling at the Finnish miracle.

Number sense, concepts, and operations word wall The purpose of the mathematics word wall is to identify words and phrases that students need to understand and use so as to make good progress in mathematics. Mathematical language is crucial to children's development of thinking. If students do not have the vocabulary to talk about math concepts and skills, they cannot make progress in understanding these areas of mathematical knowledge. They need to be familiar with mathematical vocabulary and mathematical terms to understand written and spoken instructions. See math word wall resources >