Teacher Quality: Investing in What Matters

Spurred by awards of federal funding under the Race to the Top competition, many states are adopting teacher-evaluation systems with…

Voices: Common Core helps teachers prioritize

Written by Megan Lawson on Nov 15th, 2012.

The Autism Project: Parent to parent on dealing with a diagnosis

How Teens Do Research in the Digital World

By Greg Hutko

This recent Pew study—the first in a series of three on the role of technology in the classroom—investigates how the Internet has affected middle school and high school students’ research skills and strategies. While this survey of 2,500 AP and National Writing Project teachers (presumably those in the most advanced classrooms) does offer a peek into this complicated issue, the window remains…

How Teacher Turnover Harms Student Achievement

By Andrew Saraf

What happens when teachers drop out? Conventional wisdom has long said that the costs associated with such transitions (e.g., the loss of routine and the loss of an experienced teacher) harm student achievement. Yet the leading research on this topic concludes otherwise: In 2010, Eric Hanushek and Steven…

November 15, 2012

For the past two days, I have blogged about Superstorm Sandy and the realities of climate change.   Even the staunchest skeptics must accept that when Bloomberg Businessweek runs a cover story, "It's Global Warming, Stupid,"  it is time to take notice.  Although climate change and possible solutions may seem the purview of scientists and political commentators, it would make a great topic for teaching argumentative writing.  Please consider this…

A few weeks ago I received an email invitation to attend an education conference with all expenses paid. This is done to get the conferences noticed in the education community. It is an expense and a necessary element of Public relations. Depending on the quality of the conference, sometimes it pays off, but sometimes it exposes flaws of a conference to the world of connected educators. This is not an uncommon practice, and as a connected educator, I look upon it as an opportunity with each…

Healthier Testing Made Easy: The Idea of Authentic Assessment

Tests don't just measure absorption of facts. They teach what we value.

BY GRANT WIGGINS

Edutopia

Credit: Thomas…

Teaching Climate Change in Sandy's Wake

When asked what was the greatest threat a statesman might face, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is said to have replied, "Events, dear boy, events."

Hurricane…

Time will tell if the grand plan to measure everything in education in the name of reform will produce more engineers, mathematicians, or scientists.   Having recently seen the Broadway production of Wicked I find it hard to fathom that the next generation of artists, musicians, stage production coordinators, choreographers and the like will benefit by SLOs or any metric that the data wonks may create.  Creativity is in fact the most jeopardized commodity that we risk losing if we…

Problems with Value-Added Teacher Evaluation in Secondary Schools

In this Education Week article, Stephen Sawchuk reports on two new studies that question the accuracy of value-added teacher evaluation in middle and high schools. What undermines the validity of value-added data, say the studies, is students being grouped by achievement. Value-added analysis compares a statistical estimate of students’ projected growth with…

I am a huge fan of twitter and continue to use it as a 24/7/365 portal to learning.  As an instructional leader, I am constantly looking for ways to discuss topics on leadership and…

What High-School Students Should Learn About Race

“Americans, especially white Americans, don’t like to talk about race,” says University of Massachusetts professor Lawrence Blum in this thoughtful Harvard Education Letter article. “Many Americans think we are in a ‘postracial’ society, partly because a black man is president, so they don’t need to give much thought to race anymore. This view is completely and deeply…

Today I attended the 39^th Annual Conference for the Association of Middle Level Education in Portland, Oregon. I actually presented for this group for a couple of times about 25 years ago when it was The National Middle Schools Association. That was back in the day when we had far fewer middle schools. The model most often employed back then was the Junior High School. Junior high schools were 7-9 mini high schools. Little kids, little problems (what were we…

Education

Why Kids Should Learn Cursive (and Math Facts, and Word Roots)