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.
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Are You Ready for Common Core Math? | District Administration Magazine - 0 views
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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.
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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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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.
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“Students will be assessed on extended problem-solving and performance tasks and will need to show their reasoning
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“need to help teachers implement the Standards for Mathematical Practice and connect them to math content. That is a big change for them.”
Liven Up Your Lessons by Giving Students Choices | Edutopia - 0 views
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Do Principals Know Good Teaching When They See It? Miller-McCune.com - 1 views
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conclude that most school leaders can’t identify or explain what constitutes good teaching, much less come up with helpful suggestions for improvement
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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.”
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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.”
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It takes expertise to make expertise,” Fink and Markholt say, yet coaching in schools is “still the very rare exception, not the norm.
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Education Week: Lectures Are Homework in Schools Following Khan Academy Lead - 0 views
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It’s not just about the kids watching the same lecture the night before. For us, the big piece is having teachers use data to make instructional decisions about their students,
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Students worked through those initial units quickly, but she could see when they hit their “pain points”—sometimes on material covered several grades earlier. The Los Altos Pilot Administrators, teachers, and students in Los Altos School District share their experiences with Khan Academy. Source: The Khan Academy Administrators Teachers Students “In order for me to get that kind of understanding of a student, I would have had to sit down one-on-one and work through problems and see a pattern, which I’m happy to do, but it takes a lot of time,” Ms. Caldwell said. “This confirmed my suspicions and allowed me to remediate much more quickly.”
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“I was able to identify those learning gaps in real time, whether it was from 3rd or 4th or 5th grade, and I was able to remediate and saw those learning gaps begin to disappear
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For example, in one small-scale experiment at Alhambra High School in Martinez, Calif., Mr. Smith found that students in a computer-aided-design class whose teacher incorporated digital lessons for use at home performed better on a post-test than did students using the standard textbook and lecture.
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Dr. Kramer’s colleague John Willis, who teaches freshman physics at Gwinnett, a 705-student district-run charter school, had just started to experiment with requiring students, two or three times a week, to view his recorded lectures and other materials online before class. He used short automatic-response quizzes at the start of each class to make sure students had seen the material; he then used the class time to dig into demonstrations and experiments
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Mr. Willis said that what used to be a two-class-period process to set the groundwork for a laboratory assignment has been moved online—mostly with student-made videos explaining the setup procedures and hypothesis planning.
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“It allows me to improve the connections I’m making with students, because now I can get into the material in a deeper way,” Mr. Willis said.
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For a recent experiment using microscopes, Dr. Kramer and another biology teacher posted YouTube videos of scientists discussing the equipment, photos of the school’s microscopes for the students to label, and their own videos explaining common problems in setting up the experiment.
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It basically led us to a set of conclusions without him telling us the conclusions,” Ms. Doksansky said. “We had to test it out on this little applet and figure it out. It was a much better explanation than the really boring one in the book.
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because the flipped-classroom format requires students to commit to doing a lot more work on their own
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For Gwinnett’s Mr. Burmester, the proof will be in classroom practice. “The critical thing about all this [technology] is, what are you going to do differently, based on it?” he said. “Without a change, it’s just more stuff.
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Governments cut computing costs in the cloud - USATODAY.com - 0 views
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"Technology allows them to become more productive and effective serving citizens with scarcer resources," says Andrew Bartels, analyst at Forrester Research.
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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.
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"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."
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12 ways to keep your employees motivated, engaged and unified | SmartBlog on Leadership - 0 views
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when it’s clear and concise, post it in the places where employees can see important stuff like this.
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ll of these should be used to convey the vision of the organization. Spend time personally asking your employees what they know and think
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Niall Ferguson: How American Civilization Can Avoid Collapse - The Daily Beast - 0 views
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The Work Ethic
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these killer apps were essentially monopolized by Europeans and their cousins who settled in North America and Australasia
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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.
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But there is a second, more insidious cause of the “great reconvergence,” which I do deplore—and that is the
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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If what we are risking is not decline but downright collapse, then the time frame may be even tighter than one election cycle
Why I Gave Up Flipped Instruction - 1 views
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