A new report by LFA and Grunwald Associates, with support from AT&T, examines how parents perceive the value of mobile devices, how they see their children using mobiles, and what they think of the possibilities for mobile learning.
Professional Development
Blog Entries
The Washington Post recently featured an article by Donna St. George that discusses the trend to reevaluate zero tolerance approaches in school discipline. Zero-tolerance policies enacting severe punishments for offenses related to weapons, drugs, and behavioral issues caught on among schools in the early 1990s—aided by federal legislation through the Gun-Free Schools Act that requires students who bring guns to school be expelled, and intensified after the school shooting at Columbine High School. The article summarizes that “over the years, ‘zero-tolerance’ has described discipline policies that impose automatic consequences for offenses, regardless of context. The term also has come to refer to severe punishments for relatively minor infractions.”
Though this approach is still commonly implemented, there is evidence that it can be ineffectual, misapplied, and even counter-productive, leading a growing number of educators and elected officials to scale back on implementation. A University of Virginia education professor (Dewey Cornell) interviewed for the article claims that suspension and expulsion—common punishments in zero-tolerance policies—do not improve student behavior or ...
Preparing General Ed Teachers to Succeed with Students with Disabilities
96% of students with disabilities spend at least part of their day in general education classrooms. But how prepared are general ed teachers to work with those students?
Not very. And that may be part of the reason why students with disabilities perform significantly worse than their peers – even students whose disabilities should not prevent them from reaching the same academic outcomes.*
Yesterday, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education** and the National Center for Learning Disabilities released a white paper that lays out a new vision for preparing general education teachers to improve outcomes for students with disabilities. It also offers recommendations to federal and state policymakers, as well as providers of teacher education, as to how to make that vision a reality.
I was fortunate enough to attend a briefing on the paper, and one major theme stuck out at me: We’ve got to move beyond this notion that some general ed teachers have – and that our education system in many ways reinforces – that it’s not their job to handle all the issues that students with disabilities bring.
The paper points out that while teachers often work with a wide range of students in the classroom, their teaching license typically limits them to work in an elementary or secondary school, and as a general ed, special education or ...
Over the past several years, many in the education industry have debated the significance of master’s degrees for teachers, and often also whether this higher degree warrants more pay. Many blogs have commented on this issue, including Education Week blogs, university blogs, and newspaper blogs.
The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), a member of the Learning First Alliance, is also contributing to the conversation. Their website currently highlights the controversial issue of the relationship between teacher master’s degrees and student classroom success.
They note recent comments by Bill Gates and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that little current evidence suggests a positive correlation between the two, and that therefore we should question the efficacy of master’s degrees and the validity of rewarding them monetarily. Two organizations - the Higher Education Consortium for Special Education and the Teacher Education Division of the Council for Exceptional Children - have responded by writing letters to these two influential public figures, pointing out an IES- supported 2010 study on special education teachers in Florida that found a positive correlation between advanced degrees and ...
Colleges of teacher education have been taking a lot of heat recently. Everyone from the Secretary of Education to NCATE (the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education) has called for teacher education to be “turned upside down” - to move from academic coursework to the clinical practice that will help prepare soon-to-be-teachers for life in the classroom.
Of course, some schools of ed have been on this track for years. Take the University of Florida’s College of Education. For ten-plus years they have been working in partnership with the communities they serve, developing clinical programs to meet schools' needs while helping their students gain relevant experience in the classroom. And they track their graduates, using what they learn to drive improvements in their program. One example? A major shift in how they teach students to interact with English language learners.
Elizabeth Bondy, Professor and Interim Director of the School of Teaching and Learning at the University of Florida’s College of Education, recently told us more.
Ensuring Relevancy in Teacher Preparation
Public School Insights: Many critics of university teacher preparation programs see them as largely irrelevant to the challenges that teachers face in their everyday lives. How do you ensure that the teachers you graduate are ready for the classroom?
Bondy: The concept we refer to as “professional development communities” is really at the center of much of the work in our program. The idea is to get university folks, school-based folks and others, such as family members, to come together to support learning.
It must be ten years that we've really worked hard at developing these kinds of relationships. In them, we emphasize the learning of the children and what needs to be done in a particular school to help all its children be successful. It is not just the business of the teachers and other school-based folks to make learning happen. As people who go into a school, it is our responsibility to put the learning of the children at the core of our work.
Given that framework, you almost can’t help but make sure the work that the pre-service folks are doing is relevant. Because you're doing the work in partnership with people who are committed to the children and, in fact, you are committed to ...
What has me doubting my decision to finish my career in the classroom is that despite great successes, I've recognized that I am still "just a teacher" in the eyes of most people.
My day-to-day responsibilities haven't changed in 17 years, and are no different than the responsibilities of the first year teachers in my building. While I am currently working for an administrative team that believes in empowering teachers, I still find myself wanting more input in conversations related to education at all levels.
Teaching is truly a "flat profession."
So wrote Bill Ferriter last week on The Tempered Radical (a repost of a column he wrote several years ago on education's "glass ceiling"). And of course, he is not alone in this concern. Teachers across the country voice similar complaints. A possible solution to the problem he describes? Stratifying teaching, creating school-level leadership positions for teachers who want to stay in the classroom while taking on new challenges.
Policymakers are listening, to some degree - as Ferriter points out, there are successful stratification models being tried across the country. The ideas of career ladders, of ...
We all know that good teachers are important. But I think it is commonly acknowledged that we have trouble assessing whether a teacher is good.
Some claim that teacher quality can be determined based on whether a teacher raises the standardized test scores of her or his students. Others disagree, believing that good teaching is about more than test scores and/or that even if we agreed test scores were the basis on which we wanted to judge our teachers, current systems for doing so are unreliable. And still others argue that yes, good teaching is about more than test scores and that teacher assessment systems based on those scores can be unreliable, but they are the best way we currently have to assess teacher quality...so we need to use them.
A recent report from the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) may help us work through some of the very complicated issues surrounding teacher assessment. It reviews the evidence to date on a number of concerns on the topic.
I will spare you the suspense: The author concludes that the best teacher assessment systems use multiple sources to ...
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the promising early results of California’s Quality Education Investment Act of 2006. QEIA established a grant program that will put nearly $3 billion over seven years into just under 500 low-performing schools serving nearly 500,000 students (low-performing defined as scoring in the bottom two deciles on state tests). It reaches a largely disadvantaged population - 84 percent of students at these schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, 79 percent are Hispanic and 41 percent are English learners.
Each QEIA school developed its own improvement plan focused on evidence-based reforms including reducing class sizes, hiring more school counselors and providing high-quality professional development and time for teacher collaboration. As state Superintendent of Public Instruction-elect Tom Torlakson (who wrote the law) put it, “The Quality Education Investment Act puts the emphasis where it should be – on the classroom and on teaching.” And the California Teachers Association (CTA, an affiliate of the National Education Association) has been deeply involved in working with QEIA schools, helping design the program and offering training to school staff on both the law and implementing school change.
I must have burned the ears of the CTA. Yesterday they unveiled a new report on QEIA, conducted by Vital Research, LLC (and funded by the CTA), that compared QEIA schools to similar lower-performing schools. Findings ...
"Teachers are the most important in-school factor [in a child’s academic performance]; we should not automatically assume that’s a desirable state of affairs.”
So concludes Daniel Willingham’s recent post on The Washington Post’s "The Answer Sheet."
That piece struck a chord with me. Not because I think teachers should not be the most important school-based factor in a child’s education—I had never thought about that. But because I had never thought about that.
My immediate response to, “Teacher quality is the most important school-based factor” is, “We have to improve teacher quality.” That seems to be the immediate reaction of…well, everyone I can think of. I’d never heard anyone respond, “So let’s decrease its importance.”
Willingham suggests considering it, potentially by making teaching more consistent (perhaps by improving teacher preparation and/or using a curriculum to ensure that all students learn the same material), so that the individual doing the teaching won’t matter so much. To me it did not appear that he advocated this approach as much as he recommended questioning our basic assumptions. And I think that is so important.
It reminded me of a discussion I was at recently in which the distinction between “reforming” and “transforming” education was made clear. I have been hearing that a lot recently. And a post on AASA’s School Street by Francis Duffy just addressed the issue. According to him,
Education reform is a failed strategy because it focuses on fixing the broken parts of America’s more than 14,000 school systems (which is pejoratively referred to as piecemeal change) while sustaining the underlying paradigm that ...
As has been said over and over again, the recent barrage of education media has been narrowly focused and agenda driven. It has been one shot after another at teachers unions (despite the work they continuously do in driving reform efforts from Maryland to California) and one plug after another for charter schools (without mention of the fact that evidence on charters is mixed at best).
To me, a sharp illustration of the monotony of the debate came with Monica Groves, a former teacher turned dean at an Atlanta charter school, who participated in the closing panel at Education Nation. She commented:
The ... piece that I found was often missing from the conversation was, once we get highly qualified teachers in the door, what are we doing as a nation to invest and prioritize teacher development for teachers who are already in the classroom. Because as many educators agree, getting into the classroom is only the first step in the journey. Staying there, and becoming increasingly more effective is one of the bigger challenges. So my question is what are we going to do on a national level to prioritize professional development so it's not just an administrator's initiative or a district's initiative to develop teachers on an ongoing basis once they're in the classroom?
As the recent media efforts seem to, she could have championed the importance of charters or of disempowering teachers unions, two things that when looking at her choice in workplace, stereotype would suggest she supports (I don't know her position on these matters). Instead, she called attention to ...
No one would deny that having a high-quality teacher in every classroom is important. Research confirms that effective teaching improves student achievement. So it stands to reason that very few would deny that it’s important for all teachers to have access to high-quality professional learning. After all, research confirms it is a significant pathway to more effective teaching.
Yet as evidenced by a recent report from Learning Forward (formerly the National Staff Development Council), the National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers and Council of Chief State School Officers, far too few states and school districts ensure that their educators have access to effective professional learning activities.
Advancing High-Quality Professional Learning Through Collective Bargaining and State Policy takes an in-depth look at the professional learning policies of six states. The conclusion? Professional learning does not have a significant place in policy and collective bargaining language. But there is hope—the report offers recommendations and examples of collectively bargained language, legislation, regulations and administrative guidelines to inform the development of policy language that can strengthen the quality of professional development in the future.
To learn more about the report and its implications, we spoke to three individuals who each brought a unique perspective to this issue: Joellen Killion (Deputy Executive Director of Learning Forward), Linda Davin (Senior Policy Analyst at NEA) and Joyce Powell (now serving on the NEA Executive Committee after four years as the president of the New Jersey Education Association and decades in the classroom).
Public School Insights: Why is it important to do address professional development through collective bargaining and state policy?
Killion: At Learning Forward, we believe that if there are strong policies in place that set clear expectations, then there will be improved practice. So when collective bargaining language addresses with clarity the importance of the opportunity for teachers to engage in professional development, and when state policy simultaneously provides resources, guidelines and expectations for effective professional development, we believe that the practice of professional development will be improved.
Davin: I couldn’t agree more. Although we know that we can have high quality professional learning in districts where it is not included in collective bargaining language, we also know that ...
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