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
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History Engine: Tools for Collaborative Education and Research | Home - 1 views
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"The History Engine is an educational tool that gives students the opportunity to learn history by doing the work-researching, writing, and publishing-of a historian. The result is an ever-growing collection of historical articles or "episodes" that paints a wide-ranging portrait of life in the United States throughout its history and that is available to scholars, teachers, and the general public in our online database."
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shared by Deron Durflinger on 21 Oct 11
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Educational Leadership:Coaching: The New Leadership Skill:Every Teacher a Coach - 0 views
www.ascd.org/...Every-Teacher-a-Coach.aspx
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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.
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individual and team skills, they continually attend to the growth patterns of each team member as well as the group
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analyze what the athletes do and adjust both training and the game plan as a result of what they see
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precise feedback along with individualized training that enables athletes to use this feedback productively
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tailor practice drills to the individual, but they also know that individuals are motivated in different ways
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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
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address interpersonal problems on a team as vigorously as problems with skills execution or a game pla
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shared by Deron Durflinger on 22 May 13
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What if Finland's great teachers taught in U.S. schools? - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...u-s-schools-not-what-you-think
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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
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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.
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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.
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But just having better teachers in schools will not automatically improve students’ learning outcomes.
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First, standardization should focus more on teacher education and less on teaching and learning in schools
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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shared by Deron Durflinger on 10 Apr 13
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The Five Dimensions of Learning-Agile Leaders - Forbes - 0 views
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cpchat leadership learning flipping classroom transformation Competency-Based pd professional development student centered competency based
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At the same time, we need to have the confidence to make decisions on the spot, even in the absence of compelling, complete data. The qualities needed at the top—openness, authentic listening, adaptability—also indicate that leaders need to be comfortable with and able to embrace the “grayness” that comes from other people’s ideas or situations that arise.
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Learning Agility is a reliable indicator of leadership potential because learning agile people “excel at absorbing information from their experience and then extrapolating from those to navigate unfamiliar situations.
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In short, Learning Agility is the ability to learn, adapt, and apply ourselves in constantly morphing conditions.
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Problem Solvers; Thought Leaders; Trailblazers; Champions; Pillars; Diplomats; and Energizers. The researchers wrote: “People who are learning agile: Seek out experiences to learn from; enjoy complex problems and challenges associated with new experiences because they have an interest in making sense of them; perform better because they incorporate new skills into their repertoire. A person who is learning agile has more lessons, more tools, and more solutions to draw on when faced with new business challenges.” (Hallenbeck, Swisher, and Orr, July 2011)
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To succeed in our volatile, complex, ambiguous world, we have no choice but to master our ability to adapt and learn.
Herff Jones | Nystrom - 0 views
www.herffjonesnystrom.com/index.cfm
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Poll: Most Americans oppose key tenets of modern school reform - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Education Week: Measuring Teaching Effectiveness - 0 views
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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.
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ruments themselves or the means of collecting evidence. The quality must pervade how the measures are implemented, not just what measures are implemented.
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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.