Curating resources & sharing stories to empower teacher & student ownership, wonder, and daring.
A Wii remote taped to a ceiling projector. A teacher standing on desks. Twenty-five 11 year-olds offering enthusiastic technical support. This unlikely combination would become one of my greatest “aha” moments as an educator.
Continue reading “When DIY PD Goes Terribly Wrong–Or Does It?”
If you’re as passionate about improving education as we are, chances are you’ve had moments of discouragement, too. However, lately, we’ve come across several campaigns that had us smiling. We thought we’d pass on the optimism to remind us all that positive change in education happens every day–and to let you know how you can take part!
Continue reading “5 Reasons to be Hopeful About Education’s Future”
You’ve probably noticed that approaches to education and business tend to clash. After all, we spend about 13 years training students to memorize and then produce results in bubble sheets (which tends to untrain them from their natural tenacity, creativity, and passion), and then we suddenly hope they’ll be innovative and creative leaders once they join our workforce. One way to help beat this paradox: find applications for improved educational practices among the advice columns in the business world. Below are just a few examples.
Continue reading “5 Business-Inspired Tips for Progressive Classroom Management”
Have you ever played with Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button? Well, you should–and so should your students who are looking for inspiration or a challenge (especially if they feel they are always “done”).
Continue reading “The Last Digital Fast Finisher You’ll Ever Need”
Student and teacher anxiety gradually mount. Expendable activities like art and P.E. begin to make way for multiple choice practice time. Policymaker, administrator, and parent debates rekindle. You guessed it, standardized testing season approaches.
Despite all the options available for more effective learning evaluations, the high-stakes, billion-dollar machine of one-size-fits-all government assessments continues to prevail in the US. After reading dozens of articles on assessment alternatives (and their comments), we started finding clues that may help explain why things haven’t changed yet.
Just because some great business strategies have been positively applied to school administration does not mean all of them can or should be. In the above comment, the writer complains about the lack of “product testing” for the new performance assessments given at a district. However, let’s consider the logistics here. Businesses can try out ideas and products on test subjects, and if they flop, they can bring in their test subjects for another try. Schools have no such luxury; their sample groups don’t get to repeat their 4th grade end-of-year assessments–they just move on to 5th grade. In the end, it takes bold schools like this one in Kentucky, this group in New York, or this district in Colorado to pioneer and make way for change for the rest of us.
As the district experiments with performance based assessments, it’s finding it an easy transition in elementary school, but much harder in the older grades. “The poor middle school and high school students have already been acclimated to this way of thinking, so to give them a performance test is agony,” Morgan said. Those “remedial thinking skills” are what Douglas County hopes to prevent for the next group of students. (“Can Schools Be Held Accountable Without Standardized Tests?“)
The above excerpt makes a very valid point–after all, we spend years training students to memorize and regurgitate content for standardized testing. Can we blame kids if they’re a bit rusty when we suddenly ask them to access their neglected critical thinking and problem solving skills in 10th grade?
We suggest that new alternative assessment procedures be introduced in younger grades to acclimate students over time, rather than going for district or statewide plunges. This would give us a better idea of the assessment system’s effectiveness.
The above comment reveals two problems. One, the parent doesn’t seem to understand that his/her son wasn’t being tested based on opinions–rather, he was being tested on how well he could write an opinion essay. And two, what if his performance was based on someone’s opinion? More specifically, what if parents had to rely more on teachers’ anecdotal notes and feedback than on scores from standardized tests? Do we really trust a bunch of figures generated in stressful, once-yearly conditions more than insights from a professional who spends an entire year working closely with children? Furthermore, once parents receive those solid numbers from standardized tests, do they even know what exactly it is they’re looking for to “know where you need to work on improving?”
Without standardized testing—and lacking any other basis for comparison in their own educational experience—the students’ families had no way of knowing what I had assumed was obvious: that eighth graders on the other side of town were well past working on multisyllabic words or improper fractions. They had no way of knowing that their hardworking, solid-GPA kids were already far behind. (“The Good in Standardized Testing”)
Later in the same article, the author provided suggestions to use tests “for research, not judgement.” She gave excellent suggestions for improving the approach, like random, testing on small groups throughout the year, and clearly seems to value tests with more substance. However, even when it comes to using the numbers for research, there still remain major shortcomings that affect the poorest schools–schools that can’t afford books from which the multiple choice questions are drawn.
In the end, isn’t the bottom-line for assessments getting students, parents, teachers, and administrators on the same page regarding student learning? If that’s the case, we need to focus primarily on this objective as we think outside the box to uncover and share student learning. For your consideration:
Photo Credit:
Benjamin Chun via Flickr Creative Commons (featured image)
Jasmeet via Flickr Creative Commons
After boring both my students and myself with largely direct instruction math for a couple of years, I decided to try guided math. The results? Increases in interest, one-on-one time, student initiative, and just plain joy in math learning.
Most math programs are still set up in very traditional, teacher-centered constructs. In the name of “offering support,” some even provide scripts! This is typically followed by a barrage of worksheets. Then quiz tomorrow. Spiral review. Repeat.
Perhaps the monotony would be worthwhile if we all become mathematically literate adults, but this does not seem to be the case. As the National Center for Education Statistics keeps confirming in surveys conducted since the 1980’s, most Americans’ math skills remain lacking:
It’s time to look outside the box of traditional math education in order to foster life-long mathematical illiteracy!
One day, while complaining to another teacher about how I’d started hating the sound of my own voice, she introduced me to guided math. What I found most intriguing:
I started literally the next day.
And while it took longer than that to refine my approach, the beauty of guided math is you can easily adapt your school’s math program to its structure.
Any other questions, tips, or experiences? We’d love to hear about them in the comments below!
Photo Credit:
If you’re a teacher, chances are, you’ve experienced parents upset over both too much and too little assigned homework. Have you ever wondered why opinions on the issue tend to be emphatic, polarized, and emotional? So did we. We decided to do some serious digging, and we were shocked at what we found…
Continue reading “6 Reasons the Homework Debate is a Mess”