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Deron Durflinger

What if Finland's great teachers taught in U.S. schools? - 0 views

  • The role of an individual teacher in a school is like a player on a football team: all teachers are vital, but the culture of the school is even more important for the quality of the school
  • If  a teacher was the most important single factor in improving quality of education, then the power of a school would indeed be stronger than children’s family background or peer influences in explaining student achievement in school.
  • Most scholars agree that effective leadership is among the most important characteristics of effective schools, equally important to effective teaching. Effective leadership includes leader qualities, such as being firm and purposeful, having shared vision and goals, promoting teamwork and collegiality and frequent personal monitoring and feedback. Several other characteristics of more effective schools include features that are also linked to the culture of the school and leadership: Maintaining focus on learning, producing a positive school climate, setting high expectations for all, developing staff skills, and involving parents. In other words, school leadership matters as much as teacher quality.
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  • It insists that schools should get rid of low-performing teachers and then only hire great ones. This fallacy has the most practical difficulties. The first one is about what it means to be a great teacher. Even if this were clear, it would be difficult to know exactly who is a great teacher at the time of recruitment. The second one is, that becoming a great teacher normally takes five to ten years of systematic practice. And determining the reliably of ‘effectiveness’ of any teacher would require at least five years of reliable data. This would be practically impossible.
  • But just having better teachers in schools will not automatically improve students’ learning outcomes.
  • First, standardization should focus more on teacher education and less on teaching and learning in schools
  • the toxic use of accountability for schools should be abandoned. Current practices in many countries that judge the quality of teachers by counting their students’ measured achievement only is in many ways inaccurate and unfair.
  • In Finland, half of surveyed teachers responded that they would consider leaving their job if their performance would be determined by their student’s standardized test results
  • Third, other school policies must be changed before teaching becomes attractive to more young talents. In many countries where teachers fight for their rights, their main demand is not more money but better working conditions in schools.
  • I argue that if there were any gains in student achievement they would be marginal. Why? Education policies in Indiana and many other states in the United States create a context for teaching that limits (Finnish) teachers to use their skills, wisdom and shared knowledge for the good of their students’ learning.
  • onversely, the teachers from Indiana working in Finland—assuming they showed up fluent in Finnish—stand to flourish on account of the freedom to teach without the constraints of standardized curricula and the pressure of standardized testing; strong leadership from principals who know the classroom from years of experience as teachers; a professional culture of collaboration; and support from homes unchallenged by poverty.
S J R

NuSkool- uses pop culture to enhance learning - 1 views

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    Gr6-12 "If students could develop their school's curriculum this is what it would look like. Find lessons that teach core academic subjects through popular culture including Math, Science, English, History and many more!"
Deron Durflinger

U.S., Iowa need new education culture | desmoinesregister.com | The Des Moines Register - 0 views

  • Higher teacher salaries that attract and keep the brightest professionals are also needed. Here's what a PISA report had to say about that: "The findings from PISA suggest that systems prioritizing higher teachers' salaries over smaller classes tend to perform better, which corresponds with research showing that raising teacher quality is a more effective route to improved student outcomes than creating smaller classes."
Deron Durflinger

Educational Leadership:Coaching: The New Leadership Skill:Every Teacher a Coach - 0 views

  • Great coaches ask young athletes to go to "great heights" to challenge themselves. They take care to prepare the athlete for each stage of development, but they cannot eradicate risk because it's inseparable from growth. They can, however, intervene to ensure that the risk isn't so great that it outweighs the reward of accomplishment
  • The best coaches encourage young people to work hard, keep going when it would be easier to stop, risk making potentially painful errors, try again when they stumble, and learn to love the sport. Not a bad analogy for a dynamic classroom.
  • passionate about their sport and understand it deeply
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  • see their sport as more than a game
  • vehicle for developing human capacity and learning the skills of life
  • Great Coaches Know Their Sport
  • Great Coaches Develop Players' Skills
  • their capacity to teach others to play the game
  • transmit their own knowledge and skill to those not yet proficient
  • believe that each athlete can learn to play the game
  • individual and team skills, they continually attend to the growth patterns of each team member as well as the group
  • have their eye on every kid, not just a favored few
  • analyze what the athletes do and adjust both training and the game plan as a result of what they see
  • precise feedback along with individualized training that enables athletes to use this feedback productively
  • provide high-quality practice
  • Turns out he was teaching me to be a good citizen, a human being who cares
  • Great Coaches Are Great Motivators
  • set clear and demanding performance goals for their players
  • high expectations elicit maximum effort from team members and result in maximum growth.
  • understand and appreciate human variance
  • tailor practice drills to the individual, but they also know that individuals are motivated in different ways
  • study their players to figure out what will encourage each one to persevere
  • realize that sideline drills are less motivating than the game itself, so they ensure that players grasp the link between drills and the game and that everyone gets to play the game to test their developing skills
  • fun into hard work
  • culture of success is more motivating than a culture of winning
  • invest more heavily in celebrating the more attainable goal of individual growth
  • Great Coaches Are Team Builders
  • orient everyone to a common vision
  • care for one another and play to one another's strengths
  • respectfully toward each athlete, they inspire respect among team members
  • address interpersonal problems on a team as vigorously as problems with skills execution or a game pla
Deron Durflinger

Education Week: Building the Digital District - 0 views

  • I think a lot of his decisions are based on leadership,” Smith says of Edwards and his management. “You’ve got to have the right people on the bus, but not only that, they’ve got to be on the right seats on the bus.
  • instead, it tells teachers to seek their own content and align it to the subject curriculum
  • Teachers are expected to share lessons with colleagues electronically via ANGEL, the district’s content-management software, created by Washington-based Blackboard Inc., and all four schools in the district’s 1-to-1 program each employs a technology facilitator to aid that process. The district’s three elementary schools only began distributing laptops to its third graders this year.
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  • I would say the biggest challenge teachers have is the lack of time
  • It’s a constant challenge for teachers to go out and to find new innovative resources and what actually matches the new curriculum they need
  • going back is not really an option.”
  • acknowledge that the district’s modest size was a key factor in helping it change its culture and improve its achievement so quickly
  • saying the digital-conversion model “may be the one last great hope for our nation.”
  • Colleagues insist any such effort in other districts must be led by a superintendent in the same mold. “He just doesn’t allow anybody around him to make excuses or build obstacles,” Principal Wirt of Mooresville High says of Edwards. “That’s not his ride at all.”
  • e did so bent on changing what he recalls as a “complacent” attitude among teachers and other staff members in a school where achievement data were average. As he walks the halls nearly four years later, he takes perhaps his greatest pride in seeing most of the same faces standing in classroom doorways
  • by all accounts Mooresville’s teachers were given little choice but to join a new culture where 6,000 district-issued laptops to students and staff served as the centerpiece of Superintendent Edwards’ educational improvement strategy
  • Similar compliance was also expected in accompanying changes to curriculum, teacher collaboration expectations, and even staff conduct, all of which began to be implemented in the fall of 2008
  • I think ‘expectation’ is the right word,
  • ‘Here is your laptop, and you will learn how to use it. You will make it an integral part of your classroom, and you will incorporate it into 21st-century teaching.’ ”
Deron Durflinger

My Little (Global) School - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The best schools, the study found, have strong fundamentals and cultures that believe anything is possible with any student: They “work hard to choose strong teachers with good content knowledge and dedication to continuous improvement.” They are “data-driven and transparent, not only around learning outcomes, but also around soft skills like completing work on time, resilience, perseverance — and punctuality.” And they promote “the active engagement of our parents and families.”
    • Deron Durflinger
       
      How do we do in these areas?
Deron Durflinger

What Bilingualism Is NOT | Multilingual Living - 0 views

  • It is important to stop equating bilingualism with not knowing English and being un-American. Bilingualism means knowing and using at least two or more languages, one of which is English in the United States. Bilingualism allows you to communicate with different people and hence to discover different cultures, thereby giving you a different perspective on the world. It increases your job opportunities and it is an asset in trade and commerce. It also allows you to be an intermediary between people who do not share the same languages.
Deron Durflinger

How Design Thinking Became a Buzzword at School - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Ultimately, design thinking is not a curriculum, advocates like Stevenson say, but a process for problem-solving, a strategy to elicit creativity rooted in empathy and comfort with failure
  • Mindsets, grit, and design thinking are all victims of their own massive popularity, and in the rush to incorporate these concepts into existing lesson plans, have sometimes been reduced to checklist items on teachers’ overcrowded to-do lists. When treated as a classroom culture, however, rather than an action, design thinking (as well as mindset and grit) may revolutionize the way teachers and students think about failure, creative problem-solving, and teamwork.
Deron Durflinger

Schools: The Disaster Movie - 0 views

  • Whereas the best public-school systems in the world—Finland, Singapore, South Korea—recruit all of their teachers from the top third or better of their college graduates, in America the majority come from the bottom two-thirds, with just 14 percent of those entering teaching each year in high-needs schools coming from the upper third. And the numbers may be getting worse. According to a recent survey conducted by McKinsey, a meager 9 percent of top-third graduates have any interest in teaching whatsoever.
    • Deron Durflinger
       
      What needs to change to get more of the top-level college students interested in teaching?
  • teacher quality is a national priority: Educators are paid competitively; education schools are highly selective; jobs are guaranteed for those credentialed; and professional development is ample and subsidized.
    • Deron Durflinger
       
      What are we doing at Van Meter to make these characteristics part of the culture?
  • “If you want to change public education, you have to do something that feels like a threat to the status quo,” says Canada. “If we don’t fight about this, if we can shake and be friends, we ain’t going to change. And if we don’t change, huge numbers of kids ain’t going to make it. There is no Superman coming to save them. All they have is us.”
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