Archive
element:for-whom
Leadership
Good Work: Coming to Grips With Standards of Quality
When I was a superintendent, a group of 40 students ranging from six to eight years old asked me to visit their classroom for a presentation on quality. One after another, teams of students described quality teachers, quality schools, and quality students.
Personalized Learning
A Case for Certification
The U.S. needs more college grads or more preciesly a more job ready workforce. A portion of that need will be meet via informal learning strategies and recognized by certification and badging systems.
Personalized Learning
Review: No Excuses Works But There Are Some Lousy Charters
The National Study of Charter Management Organization (CMO) Effectiveness released their final study, Diverse Strategies and Diverse Student Impacts. The factors that differentiate high performers from the dirt bags are behavior policies and teacher coaching--the high expectations, no excuses culture.
Personalized Learning
Shift Your Classroom: Small Strategic Steps
For most of my teaching career, I’ve been a pretty traditional teacher (even now I slip back into that mode sometimes). However, as I went through the motions of trying to “teach” my students, something didn’t feel right. My students seemed to learn things only for the exam, were focused on the mark, not the learning that was supposed to be taking place. When the unit or semester was over, they dumped all their notes and assignments. Frustrating.
EdTech
Nation Earns a C in Education Week’s Annual Quality Counts
Education Week released today its annual Quality Counts 2012: The Global Challenge - Education in a Competitive World, which takes a critical look at states' performance in policy, standards, assessments, school accountability, and more in the United States education system among a competitive world. Quality Counts awarded the entire nation a C while Maryland leads with a B-plus, the highest score among all 50 states. This year, nearly half the states scored a C or lower.
Personalized Learning
Start a Student-Generated Knowledge Bank
Have you ever finished a day of teaching completely exhausted while your students dance out the door, into the parking lot, onto the buses, and all the way home? If so, you are doing all the doing while your students are not. Unless, of course, you count their texting.
EdTech
Infographic: Consequences of Teaching to the Test
Learning today has become highly standardized. We ask students to reach a learning standard and test it with statewide tests that identify whether we successfully taught them what they needed to know to clear the bar. Yet, are we only teaching students to pass a standardized test? Best Masters in Education published some compelling data recently that makes us think twice about "teaching to the test."
Personalized Learning
Blending Math Games Gets Big Results in Big Trials
MIND Research Institute, an southern California nonprofit, developed an innovative way to teach math—and it works. Trials involving almost 60,000 students indicate that it typically doubles math gains. They use visual games that all involve moving a penguin named Jiji across the screen. It’s all done without a word of instruction. The visual approach works for visual learners, students new to English, or students experiencing reading difficulties—in other words, it works for most kids.
EdTech
Infographic: Tomorrow’s Business Leaders Also Lead Cheating
Cheating is a growing problem and concern among K-20 institutions. Students are equipped with technologies that increasingly blur the lines of cheating. OnlineMastersDegree.com published an infographic this week on "Cheaters: Kindergarten to High School, College to Working World," which looks at the ways cheating begins and carries out through students' professional lives.
Personalized Learning
Building a Thoughtful Blend
Innosight Institute’s report The Rise of Blended Learning defines it as “any time a student learns at least in part at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home and at least in part through online delivery with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace.” To their definition, I add a requirement that the shift to an online environment for part of the student is intended to boost learning and operating productivity. Here's a description of rotation and flex schools and tools.