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
It's no secret that schools serving the most disadvantaged students face the toughest challenges in attracting and retaining effective teachers. As a result, the poorest, most vulnerable students--those who need our help most--are least likely to attend schools with fully qualified staff members.
One promising solution is attracting attention: Urban Teacher Residency programs. These programs combine master's-level education coursework with clinical teaching experience in actual urban classrooms. According to a recent article in Voices in Urban Education, these programs are showing early success in poor urban schools. Ninety percent of graduates from a Boston program--and 95 percent of graduates from a similar program in Chicago--are still teaching three years after graduation. Compare that to national urban school retention rates, which typically run between 30 and 50 percent.
The programs succeed by combining some essential ingredients of successful teacher retention programs: mentoring, professional collaboration, school/university partnerships, on-going support for teachers, and concrete links between research and classroom practice. ...
Education Week reported yesterday that the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is mounting a new effort to increase the number of Board-certified teachers in hard-to-staff schools. (See the National Board's website for more information on this initiative.)
The National Board recognizes teachers who successfully complete its process of "intensive study, expert evaluation, self-assessment and peer review." It has long acknowledged that only a minority of the teachers they certify work in the schools that need them most. According to recent research, Board certification raises student performance. In light of this evidence, the National Board's renewed focus on hard-to-staff schools is heartening.
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When Krista Parent arrived in rural Cottage Grove, Oregon in the mid 'eighties, it was a timber town whose students regularly dropped out of high school to work in the lumber mills. Academic achievement was not among the community's top priorities. Now, over 20 years later, students in Cottage Grove's South Lane School District perform well above state averages in assessments of reading and mathematics, and the district's high school graduates more than 95% of its students.
We were recently lucky enough to interview Parent about how she and her colleagues at South Lane worked with the community to transform the district's schools. Parent describes how South Lane's educators reached out to their community to transform the academic culture. They attended meetings of civic organizations, parent groups, church groups and other groups that had a stake in the schools' success as the lumber mills fell on hard times. Parent and her colleagues won community members' trust by listening to--and honoring--their aspirations and expectations for their children and their schools. ...
In late May, this blog reported that best-selling author Dave Eggers, Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Vanessa Roth and 826 National executive director Ninive Calegari were working on a documentary that aims to inspire public support for teachers' work while offering an unvarnished view of the challenges teachers face every day. (See our recent interview with Eggers for more information about their plans.) ...
A new report from the venerable National Research Council has found that teachers certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards are more likely than their peers to boost their students' achievement and to remain in teaching.
You can read more about the report and the National Board here. ...
Just last week, the Forum for Education and Democracy issued an important report on the federal role in K-12 education: Democracy at Risk: The Need for a New Federal Policy in Education. With its obvious nod to Nation at Risk, the publication joins a long line of reports that raise the alarm over American students' declining standing in international assessments. Unlike many of those reports, however, Democracy at Risk strongly criticizes recent reform efforts' almost exclusive focus on "mandates and sanctions." ...
Stephanie Hirsh and Joellen Killion of the National Staff Development Council have written a must-read Education Week Commentary calling for far greater national commitment to professional learning. Already in their first paragraph, they drive home a point Public School Insights has been harping on lately: namely, that recent education reform efforts have squandered much of their promise by focusing more on incentives (or disincentives) than on continuous support for excellent instruction. Hirsh and Killion write: ...
Last week, Education Sector's Elena Silva published an excellent report on the success of formerly low-performing elementary schools in Hamilton County (Chattanooga), Tennessee. With generous support from the Public Education Fund and the Benwood Foundation in Chattanooga, these "Benwood schools" used a combination of incentives, embedded professional support and strong leadership teams to fuel consistent, long-term improvements in student learning. (See Public School Insights' story about the Benwood schools here.)
The report advances a very important argument:
It seems that what the Benwood teachers needed most were not new peers or extra pay--although both were helpful. Rather, they needed support and recognition from the whole community, resources and tools to improve as professionals, and school leaders who could help them help their students. ...
Yesterday's on-line edition of Education Week includes a story about The Tom Mooney Institute for Teacher & Union Leadership, which "is a new effort by seasoned leaders within the teacher union movement to develop the leadership skills and organizational capacity of emerging progressive teacher unionists."
Named for a former Ohio Federation of Teachers president who passed away unexpectedly in 2006, the Institute aims, in the words of co-directors Mark Simon and Naomi Baden, to make unions "constructive partners in education reform." You can learn more about the Insitute in a January Education Week commentary published by Simon and Baden.) ...
We hear a great deal about the United States' standings in international comparisons of students' academic performance, yet we hear relatively little about what the highest performing countries have done to ascend the rankings. Fortunately, Stanford professor and American Association for Colleges for Teacher Education Board member Linda Darling-Hammond has had a gander at both Finland and Singapore, two of the countries topping the international list.
The practices she finds there are not hard to grasp: Give teachers an excellent education on the government dollar (or Euro), guarantee them substantive, ongoing professional development, and promote ample time for collaboration with colleagues. ...
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