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Deron Durflinger

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

www.washingtonpost.com/...u-s-schools-not-what-you-think

finland education teaching teacher evaluation edreform teachers teacher learning transformation reform vanmeter van meter

shared by Deron Durflinger on 22 May 13 - No Cached
  • 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

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
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  • 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.”
Deron Durflinger

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

www.ascd.org/...Every-Teacher-a-Coach.aspx

leadership coaching teacher coach learning education meter van vanmeter

shared by Deron Durflinger on 21 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • 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

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

blogs.edweek.org/...what_we_saw_in_shanghai.html

insights shanghai performers meter van innovative effectiveness learning vanmeter transformation

shared by Deron Durflinger on 05 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • 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

MOOCs, Large Courses Open to All, Topple Campus Walls - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...o-all-topple-campus-walls.html

shared by Deron Durflinger on 06 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • “In a classroom, when you ask a question, one student answers and the others don’t get a chance,” Mr. Thrun said. “Online, with embedded quizzes, everyone has to try to answer the questions. And if they don’t understand, they can go back and listen over and over until they do.” Just as a child who falls while learning to ride a bike is not told “You get a D,” but is encouraged to keep trying, he said, online classes, where students can work at their own pace, can help students keep practicing until they master the content. “The goal should be to get everybody to A+ level,” he said
    • Deron Durflinger
      Deron Durflinger on 06 Mar 12
       
      Why is the concept of everyone learning at their own pace so difficult for people to understand? I like the learning how to ride a bike analogy!
  • “I wish that the always-available, always-replayable and free nature of this style of learning can help to elevate education/knowledge for all of human kind.”
    • Deron Durflinger
      Deron Durflinger on 06 Mar 12
       
      Learning for all...for free!
Deron Durflinger

Shanghai test scores have everyone asking: How did students do it? - CSMonitor.com - 1 views

www.csmonitor.com/...2

shared by Deron Durflinger on 10 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • The US teaches procedurally in math, they noted – repetition of the same procedures until a student can remember reflexively how to solve a particular type of math problem. In China, students are encouraged to understand the connections between each step of the problem so that they can think their way through them, even if the order is forgotten.
    • Deron Durflinger
      Deron Durflinger on 10 Dec 10
       
      Understanding is the key, not repetition
  • Once one student in the classroom explains a problem correctly, the next student has to explain it, too. That is often repeated until most or all of the students can confidently work their way through a problem, Miller says. It’s a bit different from the US practice of calling on one or two raised hands, then moving on.
    • Deron Durflinger
      Deron Durflinger on 10 Dec 10
       
      They make sure all kids understand before moving on.
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