What a surprise.........................:)

Somehow or other, I wasn't too surprised when I read this article..........

December 22, 2013

Bumpy Start for Teacher Evaluation Program in New York Schools

By AL BAKER

Over the 24 years Lily Din Woo has been the principal of Public School 130 in Lower Manhattan, her typical day changed very little: sick or misbehaving students, budgets, curriculum woes and meetings with parents, many of whom do not speak English.

This year, however, she and the assistant principal are spending parts of each day darting in and out of classrooms, clipboards and iPads in hand, as they go over checklists for good teaching. Is the lesson clear? Is the classroom organized?

All told, they will spend over two of the 40 weeks of the school year on such visits. The hours spent sitting with teachers to discuss each encounter and entering their marks into the school system’s temperamental teacher-grading database easily stretch to more than a month.

“At some point, something is just going to give,” Ms. Woo, 62, said. “The observations are important, but so is counseling a troubled child or a family struggling to help their children at home.”

All the added work was a result of a new teacher evaluation process that began in New York City this fall. A prime accomplishment of the education reform movement, the system — or versions of it — has been adopted in most states. It has been widely embraced, in theory, as an overdue improvement in the way teachers are measured.

But it is also reordering the daily and weekly rhythms of the school experience in fundamental ways.

Students must take more tests, in the name of rating their teachers, which has caused a backlash by parents and has already led to a rollback of some of the testing, particularly in the early grades.

City education officials are sending out waves of “talent coaches” to help principals with the assessments. They are also looking for money to hire retired supervisors to pitch in at schools where the workload is heavy. And last week, to address principals’ concerns, officials said they would make the observation requirements more flexible.

This is all coinciding with more rigorous academic standards, known as the Common Core, which require whole new curriculums in some cases.

One morning last month at P.S. 295 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, nine adults were at work in a first-grade classroom of 30 general and special education students: the teacher being observed, a second teacher and three paraprofessionals assigned to the classroom, the principal, the assistant principal, a talent coach and a school system official serving as an adviser.

The teacher being scrutinized, Nina Phillips, was using a book on castles to show students how to find evidence to test their beliefs. For instance, the students’ original notion that “everyone had a castle a long time ago” was proved untrue because the book showed it was mainly kings and queens and lords and ladies who lived in them.

Later, the principal, Linda Mazza, and the other observers discussed the visit for about an hour, praising the bulk of Ms. Phillips’s performance, particularly in monitoring students’ behavior, giving feedback and seamlessly transitioning between student discussions — known as turn-and-talks — and lecturing.

But the talent coach, Marcella Barros, raised a question about Ms. Phillips’s use of yes-or-no questions like “Does this remind you of anything that we came up with on our list of ideas?” rather than a more open-ended prompt.

“I guess I was wondering if there was a way to engage them more in questions,” Ms. Barros said.

While Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio might be able to change some elements of the evaluation process, much of it is enshrined in state law. The new system rates teachers as highly effective, effective, developing or ineffective based on a mix of classroom observations, students’ growth on state exams and locally developed tests or measures. Teachers rated ineffective two years in a row could be subject to firing.

For observations, teachers can choose either six 15-minute sessions or three 15-minute visits and one for about an hour.

For a principal like Ms. Woo, that adds up to nearly 90 hours for her and her assistant just to do the observations. They also must fill out paperwork and log their reports into a new computer program. Several principals described the program as inconvenient instead of helpful, and said it did not have a spell-check function and sometimes logged them off before they could save their work. Education officials said the problems were being fixed.

As in most districts, the new evaluations replace a system that involved minimal observation, did not account for test scores and graded teachers simply as satisfactory or unsatisfactory, with few ever getting the latter.

City education officials acknowledged how hard the transition to a new system had been, but said they hoped over time it would sink in.

“It’s not like flicking on a light switch,” Devon Puglia, a spokesman for the city’s Education Department, said. “Schools have been speaking ‘pass/fail’ for 80 years, and this is a much more complicated system and you’re not going to be fluent with it on Day 1.”

However, the early results in states where new evaluation systems have been in place for more than a year are not much different from the old results, as nearly all teachers have scored in the top tiers.

Proponents of the reforms said the goal was not just to refine the grades, but also to improve teaching through more detailed and regular feedback.

But some teachers said the process felt like a game of “gotcha.”

A kindergarten teacher at Public School/Intermediate School 178 in Queens, Laura F. Bromberg, 36, said one morning in October four adults walked into her classroom: two talent coaches, the principal and the assistant principal. One took photographs. One spoke to children. Another sat in her chair, which she said took away her symbol of authority and seemed to disrupt the class.

“I wound up sitting on the floor,” Ms. Bromberg, a 14-year veteran of teaching, said. “Their presence definitely changed the dynamic.”

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the city’s teachers’ union, said he found fault with the approach.

“Publicly, they’re like, ‘Oh, observations are supposed to be about helping teachers,’ ” he said. “But their language and their approach to it and all of their directions to the schools is like, ‘Wink, wink, it’s not about helping them grow, it’s about going after teachers we don’t want.’ ”

Some teachers also said they were being partially graded on subjects they had no control over. Geoffrey E. Tulloch, a chef instructor at Food and Finance High School in Manhattan, said the school’s English Regents results counted in his evaluation.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the Education Department’s chief academic officer, said last week that over time the city would develop assessments for subjects like culinary arts and music. He also said the city would propose giving teachers like Mr. Tulloch the option of having a principal’s observations of both teaching and student work count for 100 percent of a rating.

Schools could be given the option to forgo added testing, he added, and principals could be given the flexibility of making fewer visits to teachers who consistently perform well so that educators who need help could get more attention. The changes would require the approval of the teachers’ union and the state.

Mr. Polakow-Suransky also said that no bad consequence would come from any poor ratings without input from a principal. “If they believe that this is a great teacher, then nothing is going to happen to that teacher,” he said.

Donna Taylor, the principal of the Brooklyn School of Inquiry, a citywide gifted program, said that despite a plethora of “smart, well-intentioned folks” helping teachers and principals understand the system, there were still “many unanswered questions, which make for an extremely bumpy launch.”

Why other countries teach better.........NYT article and responses

December 17, 2013

Why Other Countries Teach Better

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

 December 22, 2013

Our Teaching Methods, and Theirs

To the Editor:

Re “Why Other Countries Teach Better” (“Numbers Crunch” series, about the teaching of math and science in the United States, editorial, Dec. 18):

You describe top-ranking school systems in Finland, Canada and Shanghai. While your recommendations are excellent on the whole, missing from your analysis is not only what we should do but also what we should not do — and there are some policies that we should stop immediately.

None of the school systems you endorsed have policies supporting fast-track teacher certification programs or salary bonuses for teachers who boost test scores. None have systems of sanctions for struggling schools with rotations of principals and staff in and out that erode trust and destroy community. None set up win-lose competitions among neighboring schools.

Instead, teachers and schools in challenging circumstances receive additional supports, including from more successful schools, so that they can identify problems quickly and resolve them.

America can’t just adopt policies from high achievers while continuing with those that have failed us. Stopping destructive policies is at least as important as adopting promising ones.

DENNIS SHIRLEY
ANDY HARGREAVES
Chestnut Hill, Mass., Dec. 18, 2013

The writers, professors at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, are the authors of “The Global Fourth Way: The Quest for Educational Excellence.”

To the Editor:

Your editorial laments the poor showing that public education in the United States makes in international comparisons. Institutional changes needed to address all these shortfalls will take time, but a solution for one of the problems — funding inequality — is more quickly within our reach.

A federal guarantee of dollars per pupil, set at a rate matching some of our best public school districts, using tested “maintenance of effort” formulas and with federal strings limited to nondiscrimination and correct accounting rules, would assure all our children a well-funded public education wherever they happen to live.

Similar federal help was used to fund our Interstate highway system. Surely in today’s internationally competitive economy, universally available quality education is as important a national goal as an Interstate highway system.

WILLIAM R. ANDERSEN
Seattle, Dec. 18, 2013

The writer is professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Law.

To the Editor:

Costa Rica provides another international lesson. In this small Central American country — with a per capita gross domestic product less than one-fifth of the United States’ — students averaged 407 on the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment math test, in fourth place in Latin America (United States students averaged 481, below the developed-country mean). Since 2011 Costa Rica’s Constitution obliges the state to invest a minimum of 8 percent of G.D.P. in education.

If the United States were to do this, we’d have a national education budget of about $1.3 trillion instead of some $70 billion. That would go a long way toward addressing the pervasive mediocrity of so many of our public schools.

MARC EDELMAN
New York, Dec. 18, 2013

The writer is a professor of anthropology at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

To the Editor:

Re “Even Gifted Students Can’t Keep Up” (“Numbers Crunch” series, editorial, Dec. 15): Although more effort and resources have clearly been needed to help lower achievers and disadvantaged students, that should never have been accompanied by the nearly total abandonment of official attention to the gifted, as has sadly been the case for decades.

The argument that the intellectually gifted can manage by themselves is ludicrously shortsighted and class biased. We never make that argument about the athletically gifted, for example. And the argument assumes that the gifted come mostly from privileged classes that have private means to advance their young.

Paying appropriate attention to gifted students of all backgrounds will benefit not only them and the country as a whole, but it can also have an incentivizing effect on students at all levels and from all social groups.

PETER KAHN
Ithaca, N.Y., Dec. 15, 2013

The writer is professor emeritus of mathematics at Cornell University.

To the Editor:

Your editorial reflects a terrible truth. I am home schooling my gifted eighth grader this year, at his request. Ask him why he doesn’t like school, and he will reply that his teachers focus on drilling facts into the heads of every learner so that all can pass the standardized tests that supposedly measure academic progress.

He asked to stay home so he didn’t have to spend time “listening to teachers repeat facts that I can read in the book or on the computer.”

JAN FRANK

Bloomfield Township, Mich.

Dec. 15, 2013

The secret of the star.........in pictures and words

Hey, I just found the story of the star, created long ago by Jeannine's class of 1/2 graders........
ENJOY!!

I know I shouldn't but.............

After my breakfast (a hot cup of tea, cereal and fruit, three slices of toast, buttered and covered with luscious marmalade), I swept and cleared the fine covering of snow on the front drive, and then fed the birds, squirrels, rabbits and deer.

Then, I picked up and flicked through the Sunday NYT, going first , as usual, to the Review Section. I skimmed the pages, making a mental note of what I would read later. When I picked up the main paper, I was somewhat surprised to see a picture of a classroom of kids, under the headline, SUBTRACT TEACHERS, ADD PUPILS: MATH OF TODAY'S JAMMED CLASSROOMS.

I have put the article below.

When I read it, I couldn't resist the somewhat cynical reaction of someone who taught in the early 60s, the time of radical changes in teaching styles and philosophy,  when class sizes were ALWAYS in the mid forties.

Slapping my wrist,  I put my cynicism to one side, reminding myself that THAT wasn't something to boast about. It was crazy then to expect a teacher to do his/her job with so many kids, and even crazier now with ALL the demands put on teachers' shoulders. Anyone with a penny 'apporth of sense would know that.............One thing, though - at least then the teachers decided HOW they would meet the needs of all those children sitting in front of him/her, unlike now.

Here's the article:

December 21, 2013

Subtract Teachers, Add Pupils: Math of Today’s Jammed Schools

By MOTOKO RICH

COATESVILLE, Pa. — The recession may have ended, but many of the nation’s school districts that laid off teachers and other employees to cut payrolls in leaner times have not yet replenished their ranks. Now, despite the recovery, many schools face unwieldy class sizes and a lack of specialists to help those students who struggle academically, are learning English as a second language or need extra emotional support.

Donna Guy’s fourth-grade class at Caln Elementary School here is too big — 30 pupils — for the room, so some of them sit halfway into a coat closet. Across town at Rainbow Elementary School, the 36 third graders in Kristen Pleasanton’s gym class rotate on and off the bench during 25 minutes of seven-a-side soccer games, because she cannot supervise all of them playing at once.

And during social studies class at Scott Middle School, Keith Lilienfeld tries to keep control of a class of 25 students, 10 who need special education services, four who know little or no English and others who need more challenging work than he has time to give.

“I’m up there putting out fires like you wouldn’t believe,” said Mr. Lilienfeld, who used to have the help of two or three classroom aides. “There’s only one of me, and there’s a need for about five of me in there.”

Across the country, public schools employ about 250,000 fewer people than before the recession, according to figures from the Labor Department. Enrollment in public schools, meanwhile, has increased by more than 800,000 students. To maintain prerecession staffing ratios, public school employment should have actually grown by about 132,000 jobs in the past four years, in addition to replacing those that were lost, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

Coatesville, a diminished steel town with 7,200 students, used to employ more than 600 teachers, psychologists, reading and math specialists, and other certified personnel. Since 2008, the district has cut close to one-fifth of that staff, according to Angelo Romaniello, the district’s assistant superintendent.

“We didn’t cut to the bone,” said Audra Ritter, a middle school special education teacher and president of the Coatesville Area Teachers Association. “We cut into the bone.”

School districts in other hard-hit states, including California, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina and Texas, are coping with similarly squeezed resources. Along with budget cuts at the federal, state and local levels, rising public school enrollment over the past five years has exacerbated the pinch.

The staffing gap has pushed elementary class sizes to 30 students and more in parts of California, where special state funds had been designated since the mid-1990s to keep classes in kindergarten through third grade capped at 20 students. In Dallas this year, the public school district has applied for more than 200 waivers from the state’s maximum class size of 22 students for kindergarten through fourth grade.

Class sizes in some high schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg County in North Carolina have swelled to as many as 40 students, and some guidance counselors are advising up to 500 students. In Cobb County, Ga., where the district has laid off about 1,300 staff members — or about 16 percent of the teaching force — in the past five years, average class sizes in fourth and fifth grades are now about 33 students, five above the state maximum of 28.

Districts are making these difficult trade-offs at a time when schools are raising academic standards and business leaders are pushing schools to prepare a work force with better skills.

“We can’t have the doublespeak where everybody talks about how important education is to our being globally competitive,” said Daniel A. Domenech, the executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, “and then education is not a priority when it comes to funding.”

In Pennsylvania, although the state’s education budget is now above prerecession levels, a large proportion of money is being diverted to replenish underfunded pensions, leaving less for actual classrooms, said Michael Wood, research director at the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center.

The cutbacks have been particularly pronounced in less affluent school districts, which have trouble raising local property taxes or asking parents’ associations to fill in gaps.

Wealthier communities can lean more on parents and local taxpayers. Just 35 miles from Coatesville, in the Lower Merion School District, which shares a border with the ravaged Philadelphia school district, enrollment has swelled by about 15 percent to 7,900 students in the past five years. Property taxes have increased every year since 2008, and even elementary students now study foreign languages. The district has avoided cutting any staff members, leaving class sizes in the low to mid-20s.

Here in Coatesville, by contrast, where more than half of the district’s students are eligible for free and reduced-price lunches, the school board has twice raised the maximum class size for third through fifth grades in the past five years, with some classes topping out at 33 students.

Staff cuts among reading, special education and English language specialists have hit especially hard.

On a recent afternoon at Scott Middle School, Mr. Lilienfeld placed a red rubber ball atop a stool at the front of the classroom. The setup served as a makeshift buzzer in a quiz game intended to help students review for a coming test.

One English-language learner put his head on his desk and refused to participate. Another girl, who receives special education services, spent the entire period doodling on a notepad. When several boys taunted a girl and she responded with an explosive “Shut up!” Mr. Lilienfeld ordered her out of the room.

“There is no way I could adapt the curriculum to meet the needs of all the kids in my class,” he said. During the next period, 26 students filed into Mr. Lilienfeld’s classroom for a study hall period, which is used to fill out their schedules because the school has cut so many electives.

The cutbacks in staff levels during the recession and its aftermath followed two decades in which the teaching force across the country expanded at a much faster rate than student enrollment.

According to Richard M. Ingersoll, a professor of education and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, the public school population increased by 24 percent from 1987 to 2012, while the number of working teachers grew by 46 percent.

Teachers say the delicate balance of a class ecosystem, with its range of personalities, academic abilities and social skills, can be upset by just a few more students in the room. Still, research on the importance of class size in helping students learn is mixed. Although a study in Tennessee in the 1980s showed that children benefited from smaller class sizes of 13 to 17 students in the early grades, other studies have shown few effects.

Students, nonetheless, take notice. In Mrs. Guy’s fourth-grade class in Coatesville, Julian Rodriguez, 9, said the number of students resulted in “too much noise for the other kids.”

Then, mustering the philosophical resilience of a child, Julian, who eagerly waved his hand in the air when Mrs. Guy asked questions, smiled. “But it’s good because you make a lot of friends,” he said.

Hey, at long last.......something positive on the front page of The New York Times!!

December 20, 2013

Setting the Table for a Regal Butterfly Comeback, With Milkweed

By MICHAEL WINES

CEDAR FALLS, Iowa — Bounding out of a silver Ford pickup into the single-digit wind-flogged flatness that is Iowa in December, Laura Jackson strode to a thicket of desiccated sticks and plucked a paisley-shaped prize.

It was a pod that, after a gentle squeeze, burst with chocolate brown buttons: seeds of milkweed, the favored — indeed, the only — food of the monarch butterfly caterpillar.

Once wild and common, milkweed has diminished as cropland expansion has drastically cut grasslands and conservation lands. Diminished too is the iconic monarch.

Dr. Jackson, a University of Northern Iowa biologist and director of its Tallgrass Prairie Center, is part of a growing effort to rescue the monarch. Her prairie center not only grows milkweed seeds for the state’s natural resources department, which spreads them in parks and other government lands, but has helped seed thousands of acres statewide with milkweed and other native plants in a broader effort to revive the flora and fauna that once blanketed more than four-fifths of the state.

Nationwide, organizations are working to increase the monarchs’ flagging numbers. At the University of Minnesota, a coalition of nonprofits and government agencies called Monarch Joint Venture is funding research and conservation efforts. At the University of Kansas, Monarch Watch has enlisted supporters to create nearly 7,450 so-called way stations, milkweed-rich backyards and other feeding and breeding spots along migration routes on the East and West Coasts and the Midwest.

But it remains an uphill struggle. The number of monarchs that completed the largest and most arduous migration this fall, from the northern United States and Canada to a mountainside forest in Mexico, dropped precipitously, apparently to the lowest level yet recorded. In 2010 at the University of Northern Iowa, a summertime count in some 100 acres of prairie grasses and flowers turned up 176 monarchs; this year, there were 11.

The decline has no single cause. Drought and bad weather have decimated the monarch during some recent migrations. Illegal logging of its winter home in Mexico has been a constant threat. Some studies conclude that pesticides and fungicides contribute not just to the monarchs’ woes, but to population declines among bees, other butterflies and pollinators in general.

But the greatest threat to the butterfly, most experts agree, is its dwindling habitat in the Midwest and the Great Plains, the vast expanse over which monarchs fly, breed new generations and die during migrations every spring and autumn. Simply put, they say, the flyway’s milkweed may no longer be abundant enough to support the clouds of monarchs of years past.

Soaring demand for corn, spurred by federal requirements that gasoline be laced with corn-based ethanol, has tripled prices in a decade and encouraged farmers to plant even in places once deemed worthless. Since 2007, farmers nationwide have taken more than 17,500 square miles of land out of federal conservation reserves, an Agriculture Department venture that pays growers modest sums to leave land fallow for wildlife. Iowa has lost a quarter of its reserve land; Kansas, nearly 30 percent; South Dakota, half.

A study published in February in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed land use in five states — Iowa, Minnesota, the Dakotas and Nebraska — in the broad arc of farmland where corn and soybeans are intensively planted. Over the five years from 2006 to 2011, the study concluded, 5 percent to 30 percent of the grasslands were converted to corn and soybean fields, a rate it said was “comparable to deforestation rates in Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia.”

At the same time, farmers have switched in droves to new varieties of crops that are genetically engineered to tolerate the most widely used weed killer in the United States. The resulting use of weed killers has wiped out much of the milkweed that once grew between crop rows and on buffer strips separating fields and roads.

Roughly half of all Mexico-bound monarchs are hatched in the Midwest and depend as caterpillars on milkweed for food, according to a 2012 study that concluded that the region lost 58 percent of its milkweed and 81 percent of its monarchs between 1999 and 2010.

Said Dr. Jackson, “I can drive five hours east, five hours north, five hours south, five hours west and see nothing — nothing — but corn and soybeans.”

Beleaguered as they are, the butterflies do have one advantage: their seemingly unmatched popularity. Scientists allow that neither the butterfly nor its migration is crucial to the balance of nature. But as rallying points for conservationists and early warning signals of environmental problems, they are invaluable, backers say.

Monarch Watch’s director, Chip Taylor, decided last spring to sell milkweed “plugs” to supporters, charging $58 for a flat of 32 plants — and sold 22,000. The Natural Resources Defense Council gave him a grant this month to supply still more to 100 schools. Even the crowdfunding website Kickstarter sports a proposal to rally monarch support through an arts program.

There is no shortage of ideas. The Pollinator Partnership, a San Francisco-based organization, is pushing for federal legislation that would encourage more state highway departments to stop mowing roadsides and plant bee-friendly wildflowers and monarch habitat instead. (Some states, including Iowa, Texas and Minnesota, already plant some medians and shoulders.)

Next month, the group will publish a booklet showing utility companies how to establish monarch habitats under their power line rights-of-way. The organization’s executive director, Laurie Davies Adams, promoted aid to monarchs before the Wildlife Habitat Council, a consortium of major corporations involved in environmental stewardship.

“This is the Fortune 500 — big manufacturing and mining concerns,” she said in an interview. “I talked about pollinators and monarchs specifically, and they get it. But nobody’s acting yet.”

A few have stepped forward. Chevron added monarch habitat several years ago to a 500-acre stretch of native wetlands and prairie it maintains on an old refinery site 20 miles west of Cincinnati. Waste Management Inc. includes butterfly-friendly plantings on scores of capped landfills around the nation.

Dr. Taylor, of Monarch Watch, said he was convinced that the annual migration to Mexico can be revived; butterfly populations, he said, can fluctuate wildly from year to year as weather and habitat change. The insect’s troubles probably were as deep, or deeper, during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, he said. But so far, he said, monarch backers are mostly preaching to the choir, “and the choir’s of limited size.”

Northern Iowa’s Dr. Jackson said it would take a much larger — and speedier — effort to undo the impact of thousands of square miles of habitat loss.

“Monarchs are just like other iconic species,” she said. “Once people stop being accustomed to seeing them, they stop caring and they forget. Support drops like a ratchet.”

Some of THE best articles - in my opinion - on The Open Education Era, 1960s/1970s

Hey, teachers and those interested in the current, prevailing challenges to public education that I have referred to regularly in my blog.......

I've just been sorting through all of my papers and have put together some really good articles on teaching and learning from the 1960s and 1970s.

I'm going to catalogue them as soon as I can and will put the list on my blog.

IF anyone is interested, for research or just would like to know how good the teaching and learning processes were, please email me and I will send you any copies you would like to read. Oh, I also could lend anyone a copy of Yesterday I found, an account of a UK teacher's classroom work in the 1960s.

The first article in my list with be the widely circulated Joseph Featherstone's articles in The New Republic.

OK, as soon as I have had yet another cup of tea, I will start sorting out the papers.........

David Hawkins.........my mentor, my inspiration, my friend......the night he showed me the featherstone article.

OK, here goes.........in chronological order, 

and, reader, please remember that these articles are MY favs and the originals are still in my possession:

• The Primary School Revolution in Britain - Jay Featherstone
• Come into the garden, Maude - John Paull :)
• Messing about in science - David Hawkins
• I, Thou and It - David Hawkins
• A bird in the window - David Hawkins
• Square Two, Square Three - David Hawkins
• Statement on Environmental Education - David Hawkins
• Some thoughts on sciencing - Bill Browse
• School needs and museums - John Paull
• Leicestershire Revisited - Bill Hull
• A little bit of chaos - Beatrice and Ronald Gross
• Some problems in developing an 'open-education' classroom - Elwyn Richardson
• An Experience in Froebel's garden - Elizabeth Cole
• Teachers' Centers - a British first - Stephen Bailey 
• Starting off - September in an OPEN classroom - Maja Apelman
• Scafolding children's learning - Laura Berk and Adam Winsler
• Education through the environment - John Paull
• The Exploratorium - Frank Oppenheimer
• Open Education Revisited - Lydia Smith
• 
  
• and three books:
• 
  
• The Informed vision - David Hawkins
• How children fail - John Holt
• Yesterday I found -  John and Dorothy Paull

2 When, oh, when.................

It's breakfast time and I'm enjoying my cup of steaming hot tea, listening to NPR.
There's a report on teaching - again. It focuses on a school that is using children's curiosity to engage and motivate. I then pick up today's NYT Times........


Teachers, and those involved in the teacher education process, take a look at this article in today's NYT.

As someone who worked CONCURRENTLY in a University School of Education program AND created and ran his own Teacher Preparation program, I know which process turn out the better teachers.

In my university work, student teachers spent one day per week in a classroom with a lead teacher . In my teacher preparation program, student teachers spent four days EACH week, co-teaching with a successful, inspiring teacher. The remaining day focused on sharing, discussing and learning about HOW to engage and motivate students.

Which program do you think turned out the most successful teachers?

The answer? Just look at the data of how many university trained teachers LEAVE the profession after three years.

December 16, 2013

‘What Is Good Teaching?’

By JOE NOCERA

In 2006, an idealistic New York public schoolteacher named Kevin Greer joined the faculty of an idealistic new high school, Brooklyn Community Arts and Media. Greer had previously taught English to 12th grade honors students at Dewitt Clinton, a huge high school in the Bronx. At B.C.A.M., which hoped to inspire students with an arts-driven curriculum, he would be teaching ninth graders. Most of the students had not chosen B.C.A.M., but had simply been assigned to the school. They weren’t nearly as self-motivated as Greer’s former students. Many if not most of them read below grade level.

Greer’s first approach to teaching these students was to refuse to concede to their obvious difficulties. He taught Plato and lectured about such things as “the rhetorical strategy of repetition of a phrase at the beginning of clauses. We call it anaphora.” He seemed distant from the students, and they reacted in kind, yawning or talking among themselves. Greer knew he was not getting through to them. He was frustrated.

Three years later, when members of this first B.C.A.M. class were seniors, Greer decided to teach a poetry class revolving around William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” This time, however, his demeanor was completely different. He engaged the students by asking them what their own definition of poetry was — and they responded eagerly. He was more relaxed and more confident. “I had to learn how to really break things down,” he told me recently. “I had to learn to work on several levels at a time.” Because, after all, he had students of various abilities in his classes.

I know these details about Kevin Greer’s classroom performance because I recently saw a documentary about B.C.A.M. that has been passed from teachers’ group to teachers’ group, from reformers to union executives, like samizdat. The film, called “The New Public” and produced and directed by a filmmaker named Jyllian Gunther, tracks that first B.C.A.M. class in both the class’s first and last years at the school.

Once she finished the film, Gunther sent it around the various film festivals. None of them bit. “The New Public” was shown once on PBS, but aside from that, it has not been seen widely. Instead, teachers — as well as those who teach teachers — have slowly found out about it and have embraced it.

Partly this is because it is the rare film that sympathetically conveys how hard it is to be a teacher in an inner-city school. “The New Public” not only shows what goes on in the classroom — which can be rough if the teacher can’t manage the classroom — but she also goes into the homes of the students she has focused on. There, the odds that the students are trying to overcome are made abundantly clear.

But it is also because the movie is an unwitting primer on how to teach disadvantaged students. There are teachers in the movie who know how to connect with their students, and teachers who don’t. Teachers College at Columbia University liked the film so much that it is creating a companion curriculum, so the film can be used to help train teachers. Until Gunther’s movie came along, Teachers College used to show “The Wire” to give prospective teachers a feel for what it’s like to teach in a disadvantaged community.

“What is good teaching?” asked Anand Marri, a professor at Teachers College who has championed the film. “Is teaching different in the Bronx versus the suburbs? How much do you start with where the students are?” For the most part, these elemental questions are ones that schools of education don’t ask nearly enough.

The lack of teacher training in education schools has also been borne out recently by a new report by the National Council on Teacher Quality, entitled “Training Our Future Teachers.” The question the group asked was a simple one: Do education schools teach classroom management? The answer was: not very much.

The group examined 122 teacher-preparation programs and found that while most programs could say they had classroom management as part of their curriculum, classroom management strategies rarely received “the connected and concentrated focus they deserve.” What’s more, “instruction is generally divorced from practice (and vice versa) in most programs, with little evidence that what gets taught gets practiced.”

Education schools, says Kate Walsh, who leads the group, “don’t see their job as training teachers. They see their job as creating professional identity.”

As the country continues to struggle with education reform, it seems obvious that education schools need to change, so that prospective teachers walk into their first classroom knowing how to teach. Maybe “The New Public” can help bring about that change.

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In my column on Tuesday, I incorrectly wrote that the University of California, Berkeley, had raised $3 billion in two years. In fact, it has raised $2.9 billion over an eight-year span.