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Deron Durflinger

Educational Leadership:The Effective Educator:The Flexible Teacher - 1 views

  • Effective teaching is variable
    • Deron Durflinger
       
      Teachers must adapt and be flexible.
  • They do not teach the same way and use the same instructional repertoire year after year
  • Effective teaching is contextual
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  • Effective teachers alter, adjust, and change their instruction depending on who is in the classroom and the extent to which those students are achieving
    • Deron Durflinger
       
      Effective Teachers know their students.
  • Effective teaching is premised on students' intellectual curiosity.
  • Effective teaching must be somewhat autonomous.
  • Such teachers are close to their students in intellectual as well as psychological ways, and they must be empowered to use their judgment to make classroom decisions.
  • Ultimately, effective teaching is fearless.
  • effective teachers must adjust curriculum, methods, and pacing to meet the needs of the students.
  • priority on student needs
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.
Deron Durflinger

7 Habits of Highly Effective Tech-leading Principals -- THE Journal - 0 views

  • Principals must effectively and consistently model the use of the same technology tools they expect teachers to use in their classrooms with the students. Principals must be consistent in their decisions and expectations about integrating learning technology in the school. The principal's communication about the pace and process of integrating learning technology needs to be clear and reasonable. The principal must provide appropriate professional development time and resources to support effective classroom implementation of technology. The principal must support early adopters and risk takers. The principal must do whatever it takes to ensure that all staff has early access to the very same digital tools that students will be using in their classrooms. As the educational leader, the principal must make it clear to the technology leader that all decisions relating to learning technology will be made by the educational leaders with input from the technology leaders, not the other way around. The principal must set and support the expectation that student work will be done and stored using technology. Principals must ensure that families and the public are kept informed about the school's goals and progress relating to its use of technology as a learning resource. The principal must be an active and public champion for all students, staff members, and the school in moving the vision of fully integrating learning technology for the second decade of the 21st century.
    • Deron Durflinger
       
      How does this translate into leadership characteristics?
Deron Durflinger

What Does It Mean to Be a "Change Leader" in Education? - 0 views

  • First, successful change leaders clearly articulate the need for change to a variety of audiences in ways that are intellectually coherent and emotionally compelling. The ability to do this requires that change leaders immerse themselves into radically different worlds
  • nderstand deeply is the world for which they are preparing their students
  • what skills, what habits of mind, and what dispositions
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  • ommoditization of knowledg
  • how much students know, but rather what they can do with what they know
  • second world effective change leaders understand is the world of students
  • the importance of students’ intrinsic motivation for learning and achievement. Finally, they seek out and listen carefully to students to better understand their classroom and school experiences.
  • They engage them in adult learning about a changing world and how students learn best
  • adults in the community also deeply understand the need for change, and so these leaders sponsor readings, talks by local experts, and discussions
  • The best change leaders I know bring their understanding of these two worlds into the classroom every single day
  • know what good teaching looks like, and they are relentless in their expectations. They understand that their job is, first and foremost, to be an instructional leader and coach.
  • “isolation is the enemy of improvement,”
  • Teachers must be given the working conditions that will enable them to improve and to be successful. They need time to learn and to collaborate
  • Finland, which has the highest-performing education system in the world, teachers spend an average of only 600 hours a year in the classroom teaching lessons; in the US, the number is closer to eleven hundred hours.
  • Finally, the most effective change leaders I know take calculated risks
  • Managers do not take risks. Leaders do
  • They model the behaviors of learning, collaboration, effective teaching, and risk taking that they expect of their teachers.
    • Deron Durflinger
       
      What can I do to improve my leadership skills?
Deron Durflinger

Educational Insights From Shanghai - Top Performers - Education Week - 0 views

  • he schools were joyous places.  This, he said, seemed to be the foundation for everything else he observed
  • ecause the lessons were beautifully crafted, clearly designed to be as engaging as possible. 
  • were lined with other teachers who were collaborating in the design of these lessons.
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  • worked together over months to build the most effective lessons they could, critiquing each version, adding new ideas, testing them out, until the whole group was satisfied that the lesson was as good as it could be.
  • ratio between prep time and teaching time in the Shanghai schools we visited.  In the U.S., she said, teachers typically have one hour to prepare for five classes.  In the Shanghai schools, they have four hours to prepare for two hours of teaching. This, she said, makes all the difference.  Teachers can use this time to collaborate with other teachers to craft great lessons, to talk with other teachers about particular students' learning needs and how they might work together to address them, or to do the research needed to get ready to do another improvement project. 
  • All teachers are expected to do it, and getting good at is it one of the criteria for moving up the career ladder
  • hat fascinated our team was the way teachers were expected to write short papers about the research they had done and to publish these research papers in a range of juried journals, some published by universities.
  • Of course they did not do well this way.  How could they do well in language and mathematics without a balanced curriculum, without a faculty that showed that they loved them, without music, art and PE?
  • his whole enormous system was on pretty much the same page for the same reasons, not because they had been told to do something in particular, but because the discussions they had been involved in had led them to the same conclusions about the goals and the most effective ways to achieve the
  • One was the clarity of the system's curriculum expectations.  There is a core curriculum that accounts for about 70 percent of the available time that is required for all students. The courses are spelled out and the system approves the textbooks that will be used. 
  • hat it had clearly been honed and then honed again to remove everything that was not essential and to give the connections in the logic of the instruction an air of inevitability that seemed, as he put it, simply elegant.
  • he common thread, he said, was the way teachers were treated, in every way, as professionals.
  • The Shanghai Municipal Education Commission clearly views its teachers, not university researchers, as the main drivers of improvements in student performance. 
  • teachers talked about the importance of constantly getting better, which meant improving their own skills and improving the curriculum and instruction and therefore improving student performance.  Like doctors, engineers and attorneys in the United States, they saw keeping up with the latest developments in their field and changing their practice in the light of those advancements as a core part of their responsibility.  That is why professional development and school improvement are thought of as synonymous by Shanghai officials. 
  • hey accepted the idea that they were not functioning autonomously in their classrooms, but accountable to their peers and colleagues for the quality of their own work and for their contribution to the common enterprise.   These are all hallmarks of a true profession. 
Deron Durflinger

What Does It Mean To Be A Change Leader in Education? - 0 views

  • The first world that change leaders must understand deeply is the world for which they are preparing their students.
  • They realize that the world no longer cares how much students know, but rather what they can do with what they know.
  • he second world effective change leaders understand is the world of students
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  • Finally, they seek out and listen carefully to students to better understand their classroom and school experiences.
  • They engage them in adult learning about a changing world and how students learn bes
  • hey model the behaviors of learning, collaboration, effective teaching, and risk-taking that they expect of their teachers.
  • Finally, the most effective change leaders I know take calculated risks
  • Managers do not take risks. Leaders do
  • hey use these two criteria to continuously assess and improve instruction. They know what good teaching looks like, and they are relentless in their expectations. They understand that their job is, first and foremost, to be an instructional leader and coach
  • First, successful change leaders clearly articulate the need for change to a variety of audiences in ways that are intellectually coherent and emotionally compelling. The ability to do this requires that change leaders immerse themselves into radically different worlds
Deron Durflinger

Education Week: Measuring Teaching Effectiveness - 0 views

  • ects to identify valid indicators of excellent teaching. These projects are examining the technical quality of several existing assessment instruments, and piloting early versions of new tools, from classroom evaluation tools, to pedagogical content-knowledge tests, to surveys of student perceptions. The data gathered on these tools will be compared with evidence of student outcomes, and combinations of measures will be simulated to determine which “multiple measures” might work best.
  • ruments themselves or the means of collecting evidence. The quality must pervade how the measures are implemented, not just what measures are implemented.
  • ns that classroom observation will require a substantial effort to provide adequate training for those who will evaluate, rigorous requirements to show that evaluators are applying scoring criteria consistently, and monitoring or quality-checking of scorers to make sure those judgments stay on track over time and in different classrooms.
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  • The bottom line is that we must do the work needed to ensure that measures of effectiveness are fair, rigorous, valid, and defensible, and that they result in feedback that teachers can apply to their professional growth. We owe this to teachers, and we owe it to students. The issues are complex, but not unsolvable. This won’t take a decade, but will take two or three years.
Deron Durflinger

Governments cut computing costs in the cloud - USATODAY.com - 0 views

  • "Technology allows them to become more productive and effective serving citizens with scarcer resources," says Andrew Bartels, analyst at Forrester Research.
  • Still, White House chief information officer Vivek Kundra last February announced an initiative to consolidate hundreds of redundant federal government databases. Kundra also called for stepping up the federal government's reliance on cloud-based systems to deliver public services.
  • "The longer-term effect is that this will help spur economic activity by creating governments that better facilitate commerce," says Rubel. He says tech-savvy government services "create better public policy outcomes for citizens."
Deron Durflinger

Are College and Career Skills Really the Same? | PBS NewsHour - 0 views

  • Nearly every study of employer needs over the past 20 years comes up with the same answers. Successful workers communicate effectively orally and in writing and have social and behavioral skills that make them responsible and good at teamwork. They are creative and techno-savvy, have a good command of fractions and basic statistics, and can apply relatively simple math to real-world problems like financial or health literacy.
    • Deron Durflinger
       
      This is really all that matters. Grit, collaboration and communication. 
  • All students should master a verifiable set of skills, but not necessarily the same skills. High schools fail so many kids partly because educators can't get free of the notion that all students -- regardless of their career aspirations -- need the same basic preparation. As states pile on academic courses, they give less attention to the arts and downplay career and technical education to make way for a double portion of math.
    • Deron Durflinger
       
      this is why we need to personalize learning for each student
Deron Durflinger

How to Demotivate Your Best Employees - HBS Working Knowledge - 0 views

  • This particular attendance award may have been especially flawed because rather than rewarding workers for exceptional performance, it rewarded them for fulfilling a basic job expectation.
  • hat awards are more effective when they recognize good behavior in the past, rather than behavior going forward
  • ou can't put a price on that. The recognition of hearing you did a good job and that others are hearing about it is worth more than money
Deron Durflinger

The Internet will not ruin college - Salon.com - 0 views

  • What happens to the people who make their livings from teaching, when their jobs are replaced by online courses available for free? All we need is one superb remedial algebra course that can be effectively delivered online and, theoretically, the demand for a zillion remedial algebra courses taught at a zillion community colleges suddenly drops off a cliff. Ask the music business what happens when you can get good stuff for free instead of paying for crap. Daily newspaper journalists learned a similar lesson all too well over the past two decades. The Associated Press business model — licensing the same story to multiple outlets, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense once a single news outlet puts that AP story online for free.
  • My own daughter is a freshman at a U.C. campus, and has already experienced lectures attended by more than 500 students with sections led by teaching assistants who are utterly uninterested in doing their job. For dollar paid, the value received is questionable, and whenever that kind of situation exists, the status quo is ripe for disruption. (It’s also worth noting, perhaps, that over 60,000 students applied for spots in a freshman class that ended up enrolling only 4,500 applicants, a sign, I think, that the brick-and-mortar university is in no imminent danger of going the way of the dinosaur.)
  • Education, I’d argue, has always been the most likely sector of society to get transformed by the Internet, because the thing the Internet does better than anything else is distribute information.
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  • ut how could anyone argue against the premise that our ability to educate ourselves, on just about any topic, has vastly expanded in tune with the maturation of a global network of computers?
  • kind of amazing that it’s taken this long to start figuring out how to offer truly high-quality college level courses over the Web — isn’t this exactly what the damn thing is for?
  • browsing some of the various course offerings available at edX and Udacity and Coursera, I had to restrain myself from suddenly diving into The Ancient Greek Hero, Professor Gregory Nagy’s spring 2013 edX offering that promises “to use the latest technology to help students engage with poetry, songs, and stories first composed more than two millennia ago.” It strikes me as a profound realization of the fundamental goal of the university — any university — that a course taught by an icon at one of the most elite institutions in the world would be accessible to me for just the cost of a few clicks.
  • But what’s absolutely clear is that a vast number of people can’t afford a good education, and many of those who are paying through the nose aren’t getting a good education, and that kind of situation provides a clear opportunity for the Internet to do what it does best: spread knowledge at low cost.
  • For years we’ve just been scratching at the surface of what the Net can deliver. Now we’re beginning to dig deep.
  • I barged into my son’s room on Wednesday afternoon to ask him when he wanted dinner, and discovered him watching a Khan Academy video to help with his chemistry homework. And I thought: that story I’ve been working on about the backlash against MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses)? Why am I even bothering? The war is already over. Debating the value of online education at the current moment in history makes about as much sense as questioning the tactics of the losing Roman generals in the great third century B.C. battle of Cannae. Perhaps of some interest to academics, but moot. Hannibal kicked ass. End of story.
  • he tidal wave is already here
  • utting their teeth on Khan Academy videos for help with their chemistry and calculus homework will grow up correctly assuming that there will always be low-cost or free educational opportunities available to them online in virtually any field of inquiry.
    • Deron Durflinger
       
      How do these changes in how the internet is being used impact K-12?
Deron Durflinger

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

  • “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
       
      How can we channel the power of this learning/teaching style at Van Meter?
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