Skip to main content

Home/ Van Meter/ Group items tagged national

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Deron Durflinger

Montgomery County's 'Seven Keys to College Readiness' will get a makeover - The Washing... - 0 views

  • Montgomery Superintendent Joshua P. Starr seeks to broaden the system’s definition of student success to include skills not measured in standardized tests — such as persistence, motivation and grit — in addition to traditional academic knowledge focused on reading and math.
Deron Durflinger

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

  • 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."
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • 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.
Shannon McClintock Miller

Our Documents - Home - 0 views

  •  
    100 Milestone Documents from National Archives 
Shannon McClintock Miller

DocsTeach - 0 views

  •  
    More than 2500 primary sources selected from the National Archives Ready to use tools for teaching with documents in the classroom. 
Shannon McClintock Miller

WolfQuest - 0 views

  •  
    An immersive, 3D wildlife simulation game, WolfQuest challenges players to learn about wolf ecology by living the life of a wild wolf in Yellowstone National Park.
Deron Durflinger

Carnegie, the Founder of the Credit-Hour, Seeks Its Makeover - Curriculum - The Chronic... - 0 views

  • I'd be very concerned if we try to nationalize or standardize expectations of what counts as competency," she said. "The credit hour is a fundamental academic decision. Faculty should decide what's attached to coursework."
    • Deron Durflinger
       
      Allowing the professionals to determine what competency means for each respective class will be critical to its success.
  • Many colleges embrace Advanced Placement examinations as universal markers of quality, she said. Lawyers and doctors also have rigorous qualifying exams that are essentially competency-based assessments.
  • This is not the right time to jump off the old credit-hour boat and assume that new competency-based assessments are primed and ready to sail," she said. "And we should definitely not kid ourselves that there are strong standardized tests already available that can do the job for us."
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

Recipe for high-school success: be curious, work late, ignore the textbooks - The Globe... - 0 views

  • High-school textbooks are devices that regurgitate the universally accepted and least debated ideas from the field of science and technology, almost placing us in an isolated prism where we learn to accept knowledge.
  • our second biggest obstacle lies in the method of evaluation we have accepted to assess all students. I feel that much of our attention is channelized towards evaluating the amount of knowledge a student possesses. This focus would be better shifted if we start to question what the individual is able to do with their knowledge and to what extent they can they apply their learning toward writing textbooks of their own.
  • ack on the assembly line, our society didnʼt need innovators and thinkers shaping a shared vision for the field of their expertise. Now that weʼre getting trained for jobs which potentially donʼt exist today, itʼs crucial for educators to turn their attention to building the right aptitude just as much as they focus on instilling the informational aspects.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The important moral is to simply keep trying until you find a passion worth working long hours even over rough nights.
  • best goal a young high-school student can set is to gain a balance between a wide range of skill sets; any and all of the skills can help them succeed when they eventually find their niche.
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.”
Shannon McClintock Miller

National Hispanic Heritage Month - 0 views

  •  
    September 15 to October 15
Shannon McClintock Miller

National Constitution Center: Constitution Day - 0 views

  •  
    Hall pass ! Interactive tour
1 - 20 of 26 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page