Exploring student advocacy: how do race and income affect discipline, early intervention and development, and adaptive and integrated programming? How do these influence the achievement gap?
Where is the “person” in personalized learning and assessment? | ResearchNetwork.Pearson.com
How personal should personalised learning be? @JenniferKobrin from our research network explores the balance between letting students pursue their own interests at their own pace, while keeping them on track to meet rigorous standards.
(via Where is the “person” in personalized learning and assessment? | ResearchNetwork.Pearson.com)
"...personalization can only be achieved if the “person” who is doing the learning is actively involved in choices and decisions related to the learning. Margaret Heritage, a thought leader on formative assessment and learning progressions, speaks about children’s rights in their learning and assessment. In her view, assessment is a shared responsibility between teacher and student – an active, social process that is not something that is “done” to students but something they participate in fully."
- See more at: http://researchnetwork.pearson.com/college-career-success/person-personalized-learning-assessment#prclt-G7h124kw
I would just like to share something I’ve held in for a while.
For Black History Month, the Black Student Union was provided a bulletin board outside the Dean’s office by Co-Curricular Programs in Union Hall to decorate.
This was decorated on February 2nd.
We worked hard in displaying and commemorating strong affluent leaders and inspirational figures of the Black community. Unfortunately, our works were recently discovered to be ripped down and what remained was a picture of the late Trayvon Martin (originally being part of the collage).
This discovery was found on February 13th.
The act seemed quite intentional being that the pictures were attached to a larger piece of paper as the backdrop of the collage. The late Trayvon Martin’s picture had to have been ripped away from this collage and reattached to the bulletin in order for it to stand alone. I have provided pictures of the bulletin board before and after the desecration.
The school has done nothing towards this issue. Although it was in February, I still that some sort of public announcement of intolerance has to be sent out to the student body.
I will not stress how many times this school has brushed under the rug, so many racial issues.
What do you guys think? Would you be mad? Would you care?
If so , do share, and reblog this photo and spread around the type of experiences people of color go through at PWI’s.
An Ohio state legislator posted a blog entry denouncing the U.S. public education system as “socialism” and advocating for a marketization of American schools. Talking Points Memo reportedthat state Rep. Andrew Brenner (R) posted the entry to his website Brenner Brief newsearlier this month.
Brenner began by quoting the Wikipedia definition of socialism: “a social and economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy.”
He then went on to suggest that “(p)ublic education in America is socialism” because “It is owned and cooperatively managed by the public.”
An Ohio state legislator posted a blog entry denouncing the U.S. public education system as “socialism” and advocating for a marketization of American schools. Talking Points Memo reportedthat state Rep. Andrew Brenner (R) posted the entry to his website Brenner Brief newsearlier this month.
Brenner began by quoting the Wikipedia definition of socialism: “a social and economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy.”
He then went on to suggest that “(p)ublic education in America is socialism” because “It is owned and cooperatively managed by the public.”
“It is interesting that tea party members will attack Obama-care relentlessly as a socialist system that brings about mediocrity and failure,” he said, but that they do not immediately recognize public schools as symptoms of the same big-government mindset. Teachers’ unions, as well, he said, are outgrowths of socialist-minded reasoning.
“(O)ur public education system is already a socialist system,” he argued, “and has been a socialist system since the founding of our country.”
Therefore, he argued, it must be stopped.
He argued that reformers like former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) had instituted the Common Core system into elementary and secondary education as a means of raising test scores and improving the minimum standards expected of all students in the country.
“So how do we improve our education system so students learn the basics, and learn how to think?” he asked. “The only long-run solution is to move to a more privatized system.”
He painted a picture of a dreamy education utopia where “the parents and students have the ultimate say, not state and federal legislators, not unions, not government bureaucrats.”
“In a free market system parents and students are free to go where the product and results are better. Common core and standardized tests under such a system will not be necessary, because the schools that fail will go out of business,” he said.
“Government will not be there to prop them up with more tax dollars and increased regulations. Successful schools will thrive. The free-market system works for cars, furniture, housing, restaurants, and to a lesser degree higher education, so why can’t it work for our primary education system?” he wrote.
Brenner proposed that U.S. school districts ape those of the former Soviet Union and “sell off the existing buildings, equipment and real estate to those in the private sector.”
Businesses, he theorized, will then compete with each other to attract the best and brightest students and the tax monies allotted to each of them by the state for their education.
“It will not be an easy transition and it will take open-minded people who want successful students,” he warned, but in the end, the U.S. should “(p)rivatize everything and the results will speak for themselves.”
Does it ever terrify you that men like this are elected to be responsible for our children’s education (as the vice chair of the Ohio House Education Committee) ? It should.
Also, I wonder how he feels about public funding for law enforcement, highways and fire fighters. Privitizing these agencies just makes it more likely that people with more means get priority access to them. I was about to argue that doesn’t sound very American but…
Children who enter school with small vocabularies tend to add fewer words each year than children who enter with larger vocabularies. Since vocabulary size is so closely related to children’s comprehension as they move through school, there is a sense of urgency about intensifying efforts to build more and deeper word meaning stores for all children.
Classrooms that Work: They Can All Read and Write By Patricia M. Cunningham and Richard L. Allington, 2007. Page 90. (via positivelypersistentteach)
Play is essential in kindergarten – in fact in any child under the age of 5. Through play, children build literacy skills they need to be successful readers. By speaking to each other in socio-dramatic play, children use the language they heard adults read to them or say. This process enables children to find the meaning in those words.
There is a wide range of acceptable developmental levels in kindergarten; so a fluid classroom enables teachers to observe where each child is and adjust the curriculum accordingly. Two major studies confirmed the value of play vs. teaching reading skills to young children. Both compared children who learned to read at 5 with those who learned at 7 and spent their early years in play-based activities. Those who read at 5 had no advantage. Those who learned to read later had better comprehension by age 11, because their early play experiences improved their language development. Yet current educational policy banishes play in favor of direct instruction of inappropriate academic content and testing; practices that are ineffective for young children.
Here is a little segment from a local public radio program I caught in the car a while back.
This clip from WESA’s “Life of Learning” covers one of the most resounding themes in this year’s Three Rivers Educational Technology Conference: The call for more integration of today’s technology in classrooms, and more importantly, how more advanced and expensive technology will affect low-budget public schools.
The above picture was published in a blog post on a technology solutions site detailing the need for smart boards, tablets, laptops, and up-to-date software in schools. These kind of classrooms are becoming more and more common. My senior year in high school a handful of classrooms were in beta for touch-sensitive smart boards and community laptops for classroom use. While wireless connectivity is not in any sense new, it only became available to the budget of a high income suburban school not even four years ago.
Within those four years, wireless technology and computer skills are more prevalent and important than ever. But to low-income schools, are classrooms like the above available?
Could a teacher in an inner-city school base a lesson unit on a video-curriculum YouTube channel like Crash Course (screenshot above), which give relevant and interesting explanations of history, science, and literature? What if these videos were assigned for homework to a student with no internet access at home? Whose parents work and can’t take him to the library?
While wireless connectivity and up-to-date software technology create a new variety of hands-on classroom activity and information access, hundreds of schools are still without the budget resources to allow their students these tools.
I have an issue with this article, and its not about the tech…
Let me start off by saying I am a nerd fighter, I love Hank and John Green. I LOVE to watch Crash Course and Sci show and support them on Subbable. We (my partner and I) loved these videos so much we were desperate to share them with our classes. (My partner is a secondary science teacher and I am primary teacher.) However after excitedly showing clips and full videos to our classes, we were met with blank expressions and a hoo-hah of confusion. We quickly realised that the socio economic background of our students has for the most part resulted in them not having the academic capital necessary to access these videos. Not to mention any development or literacy barriers to learning that may be present which would also affect this.
For example, (Hank and John if you ever read this I am sorry!):
1. You talk to fast! - Some adults find it hard to listen to big blocks of speech, can you imagine how hard it would be for someone with slow auditory processing capabilities to listen to you zoom through content?
2. Good scientific literacy- To access these videos you need conceptual knowledge already, take the first chemistry crash course video. (Nucleus, part 1) When teaching science to our students it has been shown that, learning is best achieved through creating understanding through concrete experiences (i.e. real world, things you can sense) for example encountering the idea that solids its hard to compress a solid, before introducing the concept ’solids are made of particles that are touching.’ Crash Course jumps straight into theory and stays with that the entire way through. This is perfectly fine if you have an academic background and are used to thinking of things conceptually, but if you have never heard the word nucleus before in any context, you are going to have a bad time. You assume a level of knowledge that is totally unrealistic for many students today.
To input these into our classrooms we would basically need to do all of the teaching. Then crowbar the video in at the end of the lesson with the possibility of extreme confusion.
3. THESE ARE THE FACTS: You deliver me the facts, and that is it. The people listening are not encouraged to think or consider their own ideas and build on them first. It has been shown that when students aren’t encouraged to criticize their own preconceptions they have a tendency to not learn lessons that clash with those potentially incorrect preconceptions. For example; a learner who thinks most of a tree’s mass comes from the soil, will continue to think so even after being TOLD that most of the mass come from air.
In defence: I know that John has his old history teacher help him write the crash course videos and I am sure that Hank and John have lots of people that consult on their delivery and writing of crash course, and that it has helped lots of people (myself included) learn about lots of great stuff. I also know that these videos are probably not intended for young people with low levels of academic literacy.
However in response to the article above please bear this experience in mind if you have students like ours in “inner city” schools, while it would definitely benefit these students to have access to more technology, be mindful of how you use it. I would advise not to base a lesson on these videos if your ‘target market’ is in any way similar to ours! It didn’t work for us, despite us giving it a good old go!
A fantastic response to my first post by a primary teacher.
Crash Course is just one example of many resources available to students on the web. Online databases and Blackboard, Kaplan videos and news stories, public domain literature and numerous learning tools and apps are all useful implementations of web access in the classroom.
Am I the only one who was like “And Carl Sagan apparently had NOTHING ELSE on his schedule for that week!? NOT POSSIBLE!” I’m not doubting the story, but I think maybe they doctored his schedule so we didn’t see all of the occult, eyes-wide-shut-style parties he had scheduled on Thursday.
A positive word from Neil Degrasse-Tyson on the recently-revived COSMOS, which premiered on FOX this past Sunday. Tyson reminds the viewers in this short anecdote about the impact a brief encounter with a personal hero impacted his motivation towards success.
As Hank Green pointed out above, it is very possible this story is true, and it is also very possible the editors wanted some inspirational blurb to connect Degrasse-Tyson back to the previous host of the show, Carl Sagan. But the picture his story creates in clear: children, students, and young people yearn for someone to look up to - and to be regarded by those people as worth something. The show paints around Sagan this iconic mentor-archetype who does not let his professional position get in the way of making a difference for a single student to whom he might make a difference.
In the media, in fiction and nonfiction alike, we are surrounded by stories of these hero-mentors. But in the classroom, curricula cater to the many, not to the few. Where can teens find the people who really get them motivated to learn outside of school? What figures in our communities are stepping out to give attention to those whose paths are just starting out?
Is paying students for good grades motivation or bribery? Can this reward system improve test scores?
This short photoessay chronicles the paydays of public school children whose attendance, participation, and standardized test scores are reflected at the end of the year in a monetary reward. Photos depict the "after" of the experiement: students eyeing up their totals and sharing with friends. There is little attention paid to the "work" factor of the project, which was Takoma's goal in introducing the program.
Click the photos to enlarge and view more information from the article's author, Alice Ripley.
"For the first time, the state's graduating high school students must demonstrate a basic understanding in 14 areas of personal finance" (Dan Kadlec, Time)
This photographs, with an array of bold colors ranging from organic to primary, depicts a classroom full of high school-aged students (or so it can be assumed in context) raising their hands confidently from their desks. This is not typically how we think of a majority sampling of high schoolers; these students have smiles and bright eyes and their hands are actually raised above their heads, instead of the popular droopy hover around eye-level. Another interesting factor of this photograph is that man of the students hands rest in a pointing gesture, their fingers thrust into the bright white, wide-open top of the frame. This is a classroom of hopefuls, students with bright futures.
This photo was used in a February 28 article by Dan Kadlec, describing the first group of students to graduate after completing a recent law which states that school must teach money management from grades 7 to 12. Considering only 18 states require one course in finance studies during high school, this is a major step to a more child-oriented and practical form of education (Kadlec).
A child in a Cleveland public school picks up his free lunch in the cafeteria, provided by a special service for students whose families cannot afford to send bag lunches every day. The colors in this photograph are muted, not vibrant, and all of the colors in the background and setting are dingy-looking beiges and grays. The focal point, the student in the red shirt, leads your eyes on a path to the portioned-out food, and farther back to the line of students behind him, seeming to fade into the background the farther back they go. These students, whose health depends on receiving complimentary lunches, are becoming forgotten.
This week Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan told a controversial story about bag lunches using a story from Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, Eloise Anderson (Kessler).
“The left is making a big mistake here. What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. The American people want more than that. This reminds me of a story I heard from Eloise Anderson. She serves in the cabinet of my buddy, Governor Scott Walker. She once met a young boy from a very poor family, and every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. He told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him. This is what the left does not understand.”
The roots of this story, as it turns out, are much more deep and interesting than the state representative portrayed them.
In fact, they are much more humanitarian that the state representative portrayed them. Using thiss story to attempt to defund free school lunch programs like SNAP, and to equate students having to eat school lunches with students having no one at home who loves them, Ryan does a disservice to the work that Anderson has done to support free lunch services like this. He also does a disservice to the families whose struggles lead to this kind of poverty and dependence.
Check out this article and get the facts straight.
All of the hands in this graphic are the same shape. They are all different colors, but not in a way that implies race. All of the hands are raised - all willing to apply themselves and learn.
How do LGBTQ issues play into student achievement? When approaching issues of racial and socioeconomic inequalities in public school, many education advocates are now pressing to disregard equal treatment and focus on practices that will aid those in need of aid. - “’ When a transgendered student is in a public facility like a school, everyday tasks like using the restroom or going to gym class. If she uses the locker room with peers of the same sex, she feels uncomfortable and intimidated, and her classmates may terrorize or bully her. If she uses the locker room which corresponds to her gender, where she is comfortable, she may face harsh penalty, including expulsion.
Making schools comfortable and welcoming for ALL students plays an important role in motivating towards attendance, achievement, and community.
Is the subject of this photograph a teacher or a student?
Is the subject of this photograph a person at all, or something bigger?
The judgement of low-SES public schools still remains an issue to this day. How can schools with limited resources give their students an education comparable to their peers from a higher economic background?
This photograph's focal point reflects the pressure put on faculty to compensate for lack if funds... And the blame, when the results do not meet expectation. It also reflects a major consequence of failing schools: juvenile crime and incarceration.
Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.
In the first video to spark my own personal interest in the child-centered education, scholar Kenneth Robinson advocates the importance of creativity towards academic success and growth.
"What I find is everybody has an interest in education.”
Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.
"Children will learn to do what they want to learn to do..... If children have interest, then education happens."
While Sugata Mitra's studies are in international education techniques, his ideas resonate with the importance of keeping kids interested and connected to resources.
Why, why, why does our education system look so similar to the way it did 50 years ago? Millions of students were failing then, as they are now — and it's because we're clinging to a business model that clearly doesn't work. Education advocate Geoffrey Canada dares the system to look at the data, think about the customers and make systematic shifts in order to help greater numbers of kids excel.
Geoffrey Canada, who you may have seen in the education documentary Waiting for Superman, says, “I do it because you would do it for your children.”
In front of the world’s greatest scholarly and creative minds, Canada compares the stagnant policies and practices of failing public schools to the decades of banks whose hours of operation were during work hours… when no one could access them!
How could these minds influence a country that refuses to change?
In an article about growing concerns surrounding Texas' dominant influence in the textbook market, The Texas Tribune pubished this tongue-in-cheek, but resounding photograph of a stack of books, all stamped with a picture of the state, and one suspiciously Photoshop-esque spine that reads, "Texas Science," as if it were a different course specifically for the Texas curriculum.
Another striking title is that of the history book at the bottom, "Creating America".
“The way he looks at it, they’re rewriting history. It’s not accurate; and it’s insulting to a number of our communities of color,” said [Calif. State Sen. Leland Yee’s] chief of staff, Adam Keigwin. “The de-emphasis on civil rights in so many areas — reducing the scope of Latino history, especially in a state like Texas — is just mind-boggling.”
