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Deron Durflinger

Are You Ready for Common Core Math? | District Administration Magazine - 0 views

www.districtadministration.com/...are-you-ready-common-core-math

administration district math sbar common core vanmeter

shared by Deron Durflinger on 02 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Sovde, a former mathematics teacher and principal in the Bellevue (Wash.) Public Schools, says one of the tests PARCC is developing is a diagnostic assessment for the start of the year. He declares about the optional test, “If I were a district administrator, I would be jumping all over it, because it’s going to give you a good handle right up front about where your kids are.” All the new assessments will measure the abilities of students to solve problems, think conceptually, reason mathematically, and demonstrate more skills than rote memorization. “That’s going to be a shift, a different way of doing business,” says Sovde. The final, end-of-year summative assessment will require students to use computers or handheld devices to solve problems or think about mathematical issues. “It won’t be just a paper-and-pencil test put on a screen,” Sovde explains.
  • SBAC will ask students tailored questions based on their previous answers. It will continue to use one end-of-year test for accountability purposes but will create a series of interim tests to inform students, parents and teachers about whether students are on track.
  • more deeply than assessments do now into what students are learning in math and how they are learning it. “I think we’ll see some questions that apply to real-world settings, and I wouldn’t be surprised if students have to describe in writing how they got an answer rather than just filling in a blank with it
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • questions students are asked will be delivered online and answered online instead of on paper.
  • The assessments will test students on practices such as making sense of problems, reasoning abstractly and quantitatively, constructing viable arguments and critiquing the reasoning of others, modeling with mathematics, using appropriate tools strategically, communicating precisely, and looking for and making use of structure.
  • “Students will be assessed on extended problem-solving and performance tasks and will need to show their reasoning
  • “need to help teachers implement the Standards for Mathematical Practice and connect them to math content. That is a big change for them.”
Shannon McClintock Miller

SimpleK12 » Blog Archive » A MUST-SEE for Every Educational Administrator in ... - 0 views

blog.simplek12.com/...nal-administrator-in-the-world

shared by Shannon McClintock Miller on 09 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Shannon McClintock Miller on 09 Mar 10
     
    LOVE this video about educational transformation!  WOW! 
Deron Durflinger

Education Week: Lectures Are Homework in Schools Following Khan Academy Lead - 0 views

www.edweek.org/...05khan_ep.h31.html

flipped khan academy education homework schools meter van vanmeter changes redesign

shared by Deron Durflinger on 28 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • It’s not just about the kids watching the same lecture the night before. For us, the big piece is having teachers use data to make instructional decisions about their students,
    • Deron Durflinger
      Deron Durflinger on 28 Sep 11
       
      The most important part of the article. It is about using the data to make quality instructional decisions.
  • Students worked through those initial units quickly, but she could see when they hit their “pain points”—sometimes on material covered several grades earlier. The Los Altos Pilot Administrators, teachers, and students in Los Altos School District share their experiences with Khan Academy. Source: The Khan Academy Administrators Teachers Students “In order for me to get that kind of understanding of a student, I would have had to sit down one-on-one and work through problems and see a pattern, which I’m happy to do, but it takes a lot of time,” Ms. Caldwell said. “This confirmed my suspicions and allowed me to remediate much more quickly.”
  • “I was able to identify those learning gaps in real time, whether it was from 3rd or 4th or 5th grade, and I was able to remediate and saw those learning gaps begin to disappear
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  • For example, in one small-scale experiment at Alhambra High School in Martinez, Calif., Mr. Smith found that students in a computer-aided-design class whose teacher incorporated digital lessons for use at home performed better on a post-test than did students using the standard textbook and lecture.
  • Dr. Kramer’s colleague John Willis, who teaches freshman physics at Gwinnett, a 705-student district-run charter school, had just started to experiment with requiring students, two or three times a week, to view his recorded lectures and other materials online before class. He used short automatic-response quizzes at the start of each class to make sure students had seen the material; he then used the class time to dig into demonstrations and experiments
  • Mr. Willis said that what used to be a two-class-period process to set the groundwork for a laboratory assignment has been moved online—mostly with student-made videos explaining the setup procedures and hypothesis planning.
  • “It allows me to improve the connections I’m making with students, because now I can get into the material in a deeper way,” Mr. Willis said.
  • For a recent experiment using microscopes, Dr. Kramer and another biology teacher posted YouTube videos of scientists discussing the equipment, photos of the school’s microscopes for the students to label, and their own videos explaining common problems in setting up the experiment.
  • It basically led us to a set of conclusions without him telling us the conclusions,” Ms. Doksansky said. “We had to test it out on this little applet and figure it out. It was a much better explanation than the really boring one in the book.
  • because the flipped-classroom format requires students to commit to doing a lot more work on their own
  • For Gwinnett’s Mr. Burmester, the proof will be in classroom practice. “The critical thing about all this [technology] is, what are you going to do differently, based on it?” he said. “Without a change, it’s just more stuff.
    • Deron Durflinger
      Deron Durflinger on 28 Sep 11
       
      Well said!
Deron Durflinger

Homework or Not? That is the (Research) Question. | District Administration Magazine - 0 views

www.districtadministration.com/...ework-or-not-research-question

homework research learning grit teachers vanmeter

shared by Deron Durflinger on 28 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • “Busy work turns students off from learning,” says Lynn Fontana, chief academic offcer of Sylvan Learning, a national tutoring chain that provides homework help for pre-K12 students. “If they can see the connection between what they’re doing as homework and what they need to know [for class], they are much more willing to do the homework.”
Deron Durflinger

IN OUR SCHOOLS: Common Core a 'monumental shift' | Cincinnati.com | cincinnati.com - 0 views

news.cincinnati.com/...304160017

common core commoncore transformation reading grading learning cbg sbg competency

shared by Deron Durflinger on 17 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • We’re all going to be literacy teachers,” said Patricia Fong, a chief academic administrator for Lakota schools. “We’ll all be teaching students how to read, write, and how to listen and speak within (our) content areas.”
  • The clear, alarming picture that emerges … is that while the reading demands of college, workforce training programs and citizenship have held steady or risen over the past 50 years or so, K–12 texts have, if anything, become less demanding,” the Common Core document states.
  • “These aren’t more rigorous tests; they’re more honest tests,”
Deron Durflinger

Iowa universities adjust to burst of interest in online learning | The Des Moines Regis... - 0 views

www.desmoinesregister.com/...burst-interest-online-learning

online online learning Competency-Based individual education 1:1 learning meter van

shared by Deron Durflinger on 30 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • “I work almost full time while getting my master’s degree,” he said. “As an undergraduate, it allowed me a better balance between school, my work and my social life.”
  • online courses are a cost-effective way for universities to meet increased demand while coping with steep reductions in state funding in recent years, administrators say.
  • The number of online courses offered at Iowa’s three public universities has grown by nearly 25 percent from 2005-06 to 2010-11, data from the Iowa state Board of Regents show.
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  • Last year, Iowa’s universities launched an effort to share language courses online. The first was in classic Greek, which an ISU student took from a U of I professor in Iowa City. This year, three ISU students enrolled in classic Greek. The universities may expand to Arabic or Chinese, officials said.
  • “the octopus room.” The classroom’s brain is a motion-sensing camera that follows an instructor around the room. Microphones triangulate the location of a voice so that the camera can focus on the person speaking. Six black arms with video monitors are attached to the “brain” in the center. This allows students in the class and those taking it online to see and hear each other.
  • They do a very good job of simulating the classroom experience,” he said. “But you have to have the discipline to stay up with it. If you get a week or so behind, it’s hard to catch up
  • blend of in-person and online instruction. Students taking finals at the U of I’s secure testing rooms, for example, might be enrolled in a daily Spanish language course where two days of class every week are completed online. That allows the instructor to focus classroom time on refining conversation and reading skills, faculty said.
  • “Part of that land-grant mission is educating the masses, and the masses have changed.”
  • Offering experienced faculty teachers and classroom space filled with well-equipped laboratories is a key way for Iowa’s universities to differentiate themselves from online-only colleges, officials said.
  • However, disciplines that don’t require physical space may one day be based mostly or entirely online, said Marcus Haack, a U of I professor who teaches future principals and superintendents in an education leadership program that many participants take online.
  • In 40 years in this business, I’ve learned we will never put the brakes on technology. It’s always going to expand our opportunities, our thinking and creativity
    • Deron Durflinger
      Deron Durflinger on 30 Apr 12
       
      How can we channel the power of this learning/teaching style at Van Meter?
Deron Durflinger

Beyond Student Engagement: Achieving a State of Flow | Edutopia - 2 views

www.edutopia.org/...udent-engagement-elena-aguilar

shared by Deron Durflinger on 30 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • This is why every lesson must have clear and laser-focused objectives -- not because an administrator is going to come in and ding you if they're not posted -- but because without an articulation of a clear goal, students can't attain flow.
    • Deron Durflinger
      Deron Durflinger on 30 Mar 12
       
      It is important to post meaningful learning targets because is helps students learn. Not because we ask you to post them.
Deron Durflinger

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success - Anu Partanen - National -... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...250564

finland Education edreform reform transformation van meter vanmeter jason glass learning

shared by Deron Durflinger on 30 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Instead, the public school system's teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher.
  • There's no word for accountability in Finnish,"
  • "Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."
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  • what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility.
  • If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.
  • And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable
  • There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.
  • school choice is noticeably not a priority, nor is engaging the private sector at all.
  • In Finland parents can also choose. But the options are all the same."
  • It was equity
  • the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.
  • schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.
  • Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more important to the success of a country's school system than the nation's size or ethnic makeup.
  • When Finnish policymakers decided to reform the country's education system in the 1970s, they did so because they realized that to be competitive, Finland couldn't rely on manufacturing or its scant natural resources and instead had to invest in a knowledge-based economy. 
  • is to preserve American competitiveness by doing the same thing. Finland's experience suggests that to win at that game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but all of its population well, for the new economy. To possess some of the best schools in the world might still not be good enough if there are children being left behind
  • Finland's dream was that we want to have a good public education for every child regardless of where they go to school or what kind of families they come from, and many even in Finland said it couldn't be done."
  • Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.
  • The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.
Deron Durflinger

"No thanks. I choose to do nothing." | Dangerously Irrelevant - 0 views

dangerouslyirrelevant.org/...ks-i-choose-to-do-nothing.html

learning leadership

shared by Deron Durflinger on 12 Aug 10 - Cached
  • All administrators have to do is LOOK AROUND and they can see the changes in their students. In society at large. In the many institutions that are dying in the face of these transformative technologies.
    • Deron Durflinger
      Deron Durflinger on 12 Aug 10
       
      This is a great point.
Deron Durflinger

Struggling North High buckles down, pulls itself up | The Des Moines Register | DesMoin... - 0 views

www.desmoinesregister.com/...h-buckles-down-pulls-itself-up

learning education redesign des moines north 1:1 transformation

shared by Deron Durflinger on 24 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • “A true transformation in a school begins and ends with the attitudes of the teachers, administrators and staff,” Smith said. “There is no laptop, tardy policy or program that is going to make a change. My role is to surround myself with unbelievably smart and fantastic people, and then I get out of their way and let them do what they do best.”
    • Deron Durflinger
      Deron Durflinger on 24 Oct 11
       
      Love this quote!
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