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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

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

Do Principals Know Good Teaching When They See It? Miller-McCune.com - 1 views

  • conclude that most school leaders can’t identify or explain what constitutes good teaching, much less come up with helpful suggestions for improvement
    • Deron Durflinger
       
      Principals need more training than teachers on what quality teaching looks like if we are truly going to moves schools forward
  • If we’re going to improve the quality of learning for all kids, we have to develop the expertise of those teachers we have in our ranks.”
    • Deron Durflinger
       
      Improving learning opportunities for students starts with clearly identifying what good teaching looks like
  • hen they must guide, support and nurture teacher learning just like we expect teachers to do for students.”
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  • We think it’s really important for leaders to be clear about why they’re in schools and what they’re intending to accomplish.”
  • It takes expertise to make expertise,” Fink and Markholt say, yet coaching in schools is “still the very rare exception, not the norm.
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

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

12 ways to keep your employees motivated, engaged and unified | SmartBlog on Leadership - 0 views

  • Clearly define your vision
  • when it’s clear and concise, post it in the places where employees can see important stuff like this.
  • Give employees what they want and need.
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  • o check personally
  • Communicate often and well
  • ll of these should be used to convey the vision of the organization. Spend time personally asking your employees what they know and think
  • Get everyone engaged
  • empowerment, but that’s so yesterday
  • lots of ways to get employees at all levels engaged in planning and decision making
  • Stay the course
  • you have to adjust to and update for changing times,
  • Practice random acts of kindness
  • ust make whatever you do personal and from the heart
  • Coach for success
  • giving them clear feedback and showing them how to be better when needed is very motivating
  • daily, in real time, is always better.
  • Act fairly
  • when they’re not, you should use your wisdom, experience and good sense to do what’s right
  • and then do what’s right
  • Inspect what you expect
  • paying attention to them, discussing what you see, and letting them know what you think
  • Good bosses pay attention to everything and manage effectively
  • Give respect and create trust
  • Don’t be a jerk
  • You’ll be surprised how much employees appreciate the fact that you recognize your own mistakes
  • Make work fun
  • lighten up
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

Niall Ferguson: How American Civilization Can Avoid Collapse - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • The Work Ethic
    • Deron Durflinger
       
      This is the one I feel has lost the most traction at many levels. For sure not just with our students either.
  • these killer apps were essentially monopolized by Europeans and their cousins who settled in North America and Australasia
  • the great divergence
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  • They also grew more powerful
  • 20th century, just a dozen Western empires—-including the United States—controlled 58 percent of the world’s land surface and population, and a staggering 74 percent of the global economy.
  • tendency of Western societies to delete their own killer apps.
  • But there is a second, more insidious cause of the “great reconvergence,” which I do deplore—and that is the
  • Ask yourself: who’s got the work ethic now? The average South Korean works about 39 percent more hours per week than the average American. The school year in South Korea is 220 days long, compared with 180 days here. And you don’t have to spend too long at any major U.S. university to know which students really drive themselves: the Asians and Asian-Americans
  • Yet life expectancy in the U.S. has risen from 70 to 78 in the past 50 years, compared with leaps from 68 to 83 in Japan and from 43 to 73 in China.
  • On no fewer than 15 of 16 different issues relating to property rights and governance, the United States fares worse than Hong Kong. Indeed, the U.S. makes the global top 20 in only one area: investor protection
  • The future belongs not to them but to today’s teenagers
  • The latest data on “mathematical literacy” reveal that the gap between the world leaders—the students of Shanghai and Singapore—and their American counterparts is now as big as the gap between U.S. kids and teenagers in Albania and Tunisia.
  • Yet statistics from the World Intellectual Property Organization show that already more patents originate in Japan than in the U.S., that South Korea overtook Germany to take third place in 2005, and that China is poised to overtake Germany too
  • the United States’ average competitiveness score has fallen from 5.82 to 5.43, one of the steepest declines among developed economies. China’s score, meanwhile, has leapt up from 4.29 to 4.90.
  • Perhaps more disturbing is the decline of meaningful competition at home, as the social mobility of the postwar era has given way to an extraordinary social polarization. You don’t have to be an Occupy Wall Street leftist to believe that the American super-rich elite—the 1 percent that collects 20 percent of the income—has become dangerously divorced from the rest of society, especially from the underclass at the bottom of the income distribution.
  • Far more than in Europe, most Americans remain instinctively loyal to the killer applications of Western ascendancy, from competition all the way through to the work ethic. They know the country has the right software. They just can’t understand why it’s running so damn slowly.
  • What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic
  • And finally we need to reboot our whole system.
  • If what we are risking is not decline but downright collapse, then the time frame may be even tighter than one election cycle
  • Western Civilization's Killer Apps
  • COMPETITION
  • THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
  • THE RULE OF LAW
  • MODERN MEDICINE
  • THE CONSUMER SOCIETY
  • THE WORK ETHIC
Deron Durflinger

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

  • “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

Personal Branding Is A Leadership Requirement, Not a Self-Promotion Campaign - Forbes - 0 views

  • A personal brand is the total experience of someone having a relationship with who you are and what you represent as an individual; as a leader. 
  • If your teammates and/or colleagues don’t know what your personal brand is, the fault is yours and not theirs. Having a personal brand is a leadership requirement.  It enables you to be a better leader, a more authentic leader that can create greater overall impact.  In fact, those who have defined and live their personal brand will more naturally demonstrate executive presence and as such may find themselves advancing more quickly at work
shawn hyer

MathType: MathType works with equations in Moodle assessments, forums, and more | Facebook - 0 views

shared by shawn hyer on 29 Jul 10 - Cached
    • shawn hyer
       
      Thought this might help someone- maybe not. I'm not a facebook fan/operator, but the information is about moodle
  • MathType: MathType works with equations in Moodle assessments, forums, and more
  • MathType
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  • MathType
  • Copy equations from your exiting worksheets and paste them into Moodle assignments. Create a mathematical glossary in Moodle, teaching students to use proper mathematical terminology. Students and colleagues can copy equations out of Moodle to use in their own work.
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