By Matt Gomez

Retrieved July 27, 2013

Read this blog post and many more at:

http://mattbgomez.com/dear-parents-the-message-i-send-home-prior-to-the-first-day/

Dear Parents… The Message I Send Home Prior To the First Day

I sent the following information to the parents in my…

Continue

Stress Test by Arnold Dodge 

Retrieved on 7/22/13 from Huffington Post

Click HERE to view article on Huffington Post site. 

As the school year came to a close in my county, a front page story in our regional newspaper blasted a local school district for routinely boosting the scores of secondary students on state tests by one or two points to make the passing…

Continue

         In this paper, Lori Nathanson, Meghan McCormick, and James Kemple of the NYU Research Alliance for New York City Schools analyze the district’s annual school climate survey. Given every spring since 2007 to all teachers, parents, and grade 6-12 students, the survey invites respondents to evaluate their school’s academic expectations, communication, engagement, and safety/respect. Data from the questionnaires make up 10-15 percent of each school’s A, B, C, D, F Progress Report grade…

Continue

      In this intriguing Elementary School Journal article, Haytske Zijlstra and Helma Koomen (University of Amsterdam) and Theo Wubbels and Mieke Brekelmans (Utrecht University) report on their study of teachers’ interpersonal behavior and their students’ mathematics achievement. Rather than relying on classroom observations, which they say are “time consuming and therefore remain generally limited to a relatively small sample of interactions,” the researchers asked the children…

Continue

           In this Middle School Journal article, Rebecca Shore, Jenna Ray, and Paula Goolkasian (University of North Carolina/Charlotte) report the results of an experiment on science vocabulary learning with three 7^th-grade teachers in a large urban school. The researchers worked with teachers to systematically compare three memory strategies for learning these words: pathogen, vaccine, antibody, immunity, antibiotic, immune system, and antigen:

-  …

Continue

Read the entire article at …

Continue

Superheroes Help Students Read with Fluency

In this charming article in The Reading Teacher, Illinois elementary teachers Barclay Marcell and Christine Ferraro describe a second-grade girl who “reads 100 words per minute with a flat voice and a mind that’s focused on what’s for lunch,” a boy who reads 120 words a minute and cares more about his reading-rate graph than the content of the story, and students who ask, “Are you timing me?” and “Did I beat my last score?” Most… Continue

Free Online Content Forces Publishers to Adjust

Commercial publishers are accustomed to battling with one another for control of state and local markets for textbooks and other academic materials. Now they face a more complicated task: how to…

Continue

“E-books have the potential to change the way our students read and consume text because of their interactivity and convenience,” say Heather Ruetschlin Schugar, Carol Smith, and Jordan Schugar (West Chester University) in this helpful article in The Reading Teacher, But here’s what a fourth grader said after finishing the e-book Sir Charlie Stinky Socks and the Really Big Adventure: “I have no clue what I just read.” Why? Because he was so engaged making the wiggly woos howl…

Continue

K-12 districts, education groups, and companies deploy 'crowdsourcing' to identify better approaches

Continue

In this New York Times article, Stephanie Coontz (Evergreen State College) says that knowing the average can be helpful – for example, one’s college paper is not as good as those written by most classmates, or most people my age don’t exercise as much as I do. “Averages are useful because many traits, behaviors, and outcomes are distributed in a bell-shaped curve,” says Coontz, “with most results clustered around the middle and a much smaller group of outliers at the high and low…

Continue

Continue

SL 2.0 Organizational Membership Form.pdf

SchoolLeaderhipOrganizationalMembershipForm.pdf