Susan Goding's School Board Blog

What's Blended Learning?

2012-02-14T15:25:00.000-08:00

Sal Khan describes a model of education where social promotion, retention, and skipping students as a way of dealing with diverse learners in the classroom are no longer an issue. All students learn what they need to learn, get lots of practice to master their lesson, and then move on. Each student's education is personalized. Learning is fixed, time to learn is the variable.

"In his trademark style, Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, walks viewers through the many ways digital technology can impact teaching and learning in a blended learning environment."

Highline School Board Selects Finalist for Superintendent

2012-02-12T19:48:00.000-08:00

	Highline School Board Selects Three Finalists for Superintendent	less
	The School Board has named three finalists in its search for a new superintendent. Dr. Susan Enfield Dr. David Engle Dr. Joshua Garcia

After Twenty Years - Charter Schools Has Not Reformed Education

2012-02-09T12:18:00.000-08:00

Arne Duncan gave a speech at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Fighting the Wrong Education Battles. He said "I want to talk about advocacy that inadvertently becomes less about helping children and making tough choices—and becomes more about maintaining ideological purity and making false choices." Although Duncan supports charter schools, I wonder if the charter schools battle here is Washington state sidestep tough choices for a simpler message.

In his speech, Duncan mentions the research of Roland Fryer. Fryer's research suggests that implementing the practices of high performing charters in traditional public schools can increase student achievement. The League of Education Voters, Stand for Children, the Washington State PTA are all advocating for charter schools. Education advocates should advocate for the practices of successful charter schools for all children, rather than charter schools. As Duncan points out in his speech, Houston has done this with success. After one year, students in the Houston schools that are trying this, students gained five to nine months in math. The added cost per student is a little more than the increased cost per student for full day kindergarten compared to half day kindergarten, about $2500 per student. 20 years ago, Charter schools were created and given greater freedom with the plan that they would be incubators for best practices. After 20 years can't we go straight to best practices for all students rather than begin at the beginning as if we have learned nothing? Will we use the same arguments as proponents used 20 years ago?

When Roland Fryer looked at market based reforms he found that, “Early research estimating the impact of school competition on school efficiency … finds that schools losing more students to charter schools are largely unaffected by the competitive pressures of the charter option.”

Fryer’s conclusion:

“We show that input measures associated with a traditional resource-based model of education – class size, per pupil expenditure, the fraction of teachers with no teaching certification, and the fraction of teachers with an advanced degree – are not positively correlated with school effectiveness. In stark contrast, an index of five policies suggested by forty years of qualitative research – frequent teacher feedback, data driven instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and a relentless focus on academic achievement – explains almost half of the variation in school effectiveness. Moreover, we show that these variables continue to be statistically important after accounting for alternative models of schooling, and a host of other explanatory variables, and are predictive in a different sample of schools.

While there are important caveats to the conclusion that these five policies can explain significant variation in school effectiveness, our results suggest a model of schooling that may have general application. The key next step is to inject these strategies into traditional public schools and assess whether they have a causal effect on student achievement.”

One theme that comes up as a reason for favoring charter schools is that unions are weakened. This is an one of the false arguments that gets wrapped up in charter school advocacy. I will point out that the top performing states for student achievement are union states.

Charter schools are a crap shoot for improving education. Charter advocates slough off the low performing charter schools as if they don't count. Why not advocate for KIPP practices instead of hoping or assuming WA will get KIPP charters or charters like KIPP. Rocketship has been done. Bring the model for all students. Lynne Varner in the Seattle Times wrote today, "Comparing public and charter schools in Pennsylvania over a 3-year period, the study found "60% of the charter schools performed with similar or better success than the traditional public schools in reading and 53 percent of charter schools performed with similar or better success in math compared to traditional schools. Cyber charts did significantly worse. Charter elementary school students outperformed their peers in traditional public school; but it was the exact opposite for higher grades. In the first 3 years, charter students show slower academic growth, but the gap shrinks considerably in math overtime and disappears entirely in reading by the third year. The story is less pat for Hispanic and black students with charters unhelpful to these students in math, but helpful to black students in reading growth." That is a crap shoot that is not fair to the students in the losing schools.

There will be winners and losers with charters.Colorado has the seventh strongest charter school laws in the country, Maine is number one. The Denver Post published a story yesterday, More Colorado graduates than ever not ready for college. The states that were tops in education, Mass and MN were tops before they opened their schools to charter schools. Charter schools are a one shot change that will not change the fundamentals for all of our students. And they are a crap shoot. The odds are only very slightly above 50/50 that our students will end up in a charter that is better than the traditional school. Charters have not reformed education.

Charters have not improved our students international competitiveness. Charter schools can't replicate the success of charter schools because success is so variable and advocates only want to talk about the high performing charters, so even talking about the data leads to anecdotes and feel good stories. When the Interim Superintendent of the Seattle Public Schools tried to remove the principal at a Ingraham High School because of low student achievement the fall out was huge. Charter advocates point to the passion of KIPP students and parents as indicative of school success, Ingraham HS evoked the same passion as KIPP schools. Parents and students rallied around that school even though the data showed it was poor performing.

Geoffrey Canada says we need to teach parents to love data. Education advocates need to learn to love data. Washington students need education standards, that match or exceed Massachusetts . Massachusetts still teaches 3 grade levels above other charter school states, and nothing about charters will affect that. Charters teach to the standards of the states they are in.

In WA, The Basic Education Act needs teeth to force school districts to teach what the Act says they should. Washington needs a bill similar to the Williams Settlement in CA that requires school districts to have one up-to-date book per student in all the core subjects. And they need the 5 improvements at their schools that Roland Fryer's research has revealed. There are a lot of reforms that will would benefit our students that charters will not address.

Washington students need data driven, researched based reform for all students. Not all poor students benefit from charter schools, some are end up in a worse school. That is what the data shows. Some students end up in worse schools. I would add 24/7 access to curriculum, competency based grading and a broad liberal arts education to the wish list for our students before charter schools.

There is a lot of talk about the improvement in New Orleans. New Orleans was a broken corrupt system. As much as it has improved, it was so low, there was a lot of room for improvement. Our students get a better, higher quality education here. New Orleans is still in the bottom for education after 10 years of charters. I think there is a blind eye and lots of excuses for poor performing charters and not enough credit to state led initiatives, such as high educational standards. Another thing, I am pretty sure that most education advocates do not want charter schools for their child. Everybody wants them for Other People's Children. That right there is revealing about what a shallow solution charters are. Our top students are not getting that great of an education either. Top white students are not internationally competitive either. So charter schools are a 2 word education reform sound bite, as long as we ignore the fact they don't fix education.

Are American students better off 20 years on since charter schools? Is education better by any definition of the word? Do not tell me any more anecdotes, show me the data. I suspect charter school advocates will get charters into Washington some day. It is easier to market than high standards, but will Washington state students be better off? Education is broken, top to bottom. Charter schools have had no impact on American education. The storm is still gathering and our students have fallen in international competitiveness in the last 20 years, not improved.

American Indian Library Association Statement on Ethnic Studies Programs in Arizona

2012-01-31T19:10:00.000-08:00

American Indian Library Association Statement on Ethnic Studies Programs in Arizona

The American Indian Library Association (AILA) wishes to publicly express its strong disapproval of the elimination of the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) Mexican American Studies classes and removal of books associated with the program due to the State of Arizona Revised Statutes Sections 15-111 and 15-112. We write this statement in support of all students, educators, and families who have been negatively affected by this action.

All students have the right to develop critical thinking skills through a challenging curriculum. All students, regardless of their background, have the right to learn about the history of their own people, as well as the history of the land and peoples where they are currently living. In Tucson, this should include the history and literature of Mexican American people as well as the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui peoples. The targeting of one ethnic group is an attack on all ethnic groups, and the elimination of a curriculum and books that encourage students to consider the perspectives of those who are often silenced should be a concern to all humanity.

The teaching of Mexican American studies cannot be separated from the teaching of the history of the Indigenous peoples who inhabited this land long before the arrival of Europeans. Indigenous communities have been artificially bisected by the US-Mexico border. People from these communities may speak Spanish, English, as well as their Indigenous languages. Their histories, their stories, and discussion of their contemporary issues have a place in our classrooms and libraries. The curriculum that has been banned in Tucson includes works written by highly acclaimed authors and Tucson residents Ofelia Zepeda (Tohono O'odham) and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), in addition to a number of other Native American authors. The censorship of Native voices due to the prohibition of the Mexican American Studies curriculum is part of what prompts the American Indian Library Association to take a stand on this issue.

The systematic banning of ethnic studies and the discouragement of students learning about their own histories is reminiscent of the US federal government’s educational philosophy towards American Indians. As Native Americans, we have witnessed the destructive policies of the federal government in which Indian children were denied knowledge of their own cultures, histories, and languages through the abhorrent practices of the boarding schools and, later, through western educational systems. Because of this history, many Native Americans continue to struggle to maintain the knowledge of our elders and ancestors.

We have rights under the United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and we assert that Arizona state law is in violation of these rights. Under Article 8, the UN Declaration says, “States shall provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress for:

(a) Any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic identities; . . .
(d) Any form of forced assimilation or integration;
(e) Any form of propaganda designed to promote or incite racial or ethnic discrimination directed against them.”

The banning of the Mexican American ethnic studies curriculum is in effect denying the students the opportunity to learn about their cultural values and identities as Indigenous peoples.

The American Indian Library Association supports the January 2012 American Library Association Resolution that

1. Condemns the closure of educational ethnic studies programs on the basis of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.
2. Condemns the confiscation of the books associated with educational ethnic studies programs.
3. Condemns the censoring of historical, educational, and cultural and creative writings important to the development of critical thinking in students.
4. Urges the Arizona legislature to pass HB 2654, “An Act Repealing Sections 15-111 and 15-112, Arizona Revised Statutes; Relating to School Curriculum.”

The American Indian Library Association worked alongside a number of ALA committees, offices, and affiliates to draft the above mentioned resolution, including the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, ALA Committee on Diversity, ALA Committee on Legislation, American Association of School Librarians, Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, Black Caucus of the American Library Association, Chinese American Library Association, Intellectual Freedom Round Table, REFORMA: The National Association to Promote Library & Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking, Social Responsibilities Round Table, and the Young Adult Library Services Association. We urge other national associations to also take a stand on this issue, particularly other national and international groups with a focus on Indigenous, tribal, Native American, and American Indian communities.

While the issue in Tucson, Arizona may seem to be limited to the Mexican-American population, we recognize that Tucson, and the surrounding area, is home to several Indigenous groups, including the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui, and many students in this school district identify as Native American. According to TUSD enrollment statistics, 4% of students in the district are Native American, with most students identified as Tohono O'odham, Yaqui, and Navajo. Additionally, according to the independent audit of the disbanded Mexican American Studies program, conducted by Cambium Learning, Inc., 2% of the students who were enrolled in the program are Native American.

As a membership action group, AILA's focus is on the library-related needs of American Indians and Alaska Natives, including the improvement of library, cultural, and information services in schools and public and research libraries. As librarians and educators, and members of the American Indian Library Association, we write this statement in support of culturally based curriculum that includes libraries as institutions that can freely disseminate information about cultures, languages, and values to the community.

American Indian Library Association, January 31, 2012

Contact: Sandy Littletree, 2011-2012 AILA President, Sandy505@email.arizona.edu

References:Cambium Learning, Inc. “Curriculum Audit of the Mexican American Studies Department Tucson Unified School District,” 2 May 2011. http://www.scribd.com/doc/58025928/TUSD-ethnic-studies-audit “Resolution Opposing Restriction of Access to Materials and Open Inquiry in Ethnic and Cultural Studies Programs in Arizona,” Approved by ALA Council III, 24 January 2012. http://www.oif.ala.org/oif/?p=3157Tucson Unified School District. “Native American Studies,” 5 Dec 2011. http://www.tusd1.org/contents/depart/native/aboutus.aspUN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. “United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” 13 September 2007. http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/en/declaration.html

Service Learning, Technology and English Language Learners

2012-01-24T19:57:00.000-08:00

I read about this wonderful project in Katie McKay's blog post on the Alliance for Excellent Education website. Katie McKay is also an ELL teacher, in Texas. Her blog post is Do Our Students Have Access?

"Philadelphia Writing Project teacher Robert Rivera-Amezola also turns to technology to engage his English Language Learner students, pull together curricular goals and teach around high-interest topics of change. In listening to Robert speak about a project in which his students used a myriad of technological tools to advocate for the environment, we hear resounding themes of service and justice.

In Robert’s videos, we see his students master the use of such tools as podcasts, blogs, internet research, and PowerPoint to educate and persuade authentic audiences. Robert makes sure that his students have their own email addresses and use doodle polls to vote on topics about which to explore in depth as a class. There is an undeniable brilliance in Robert’s pedagogy."

HB 2337 Open Education Resources in K-12

2012-01-22T08:46:00.000-08:00

HB 2337 calls for the development of Open Education Resources for K-12 education. The State of Washington has already developed these resources for higher education at a one time cost of $750,000 which will realize a $41M savings per year for college students for the cost of textbooks. The Open Education Resources textbooks have already been developed in many subjects. 6-12 math and most science curriculum have been created. The textbooks are free in digital version and cost about $4/each to print.

Personalize Learning in Middle School

2012-01-21T13:17:00.000-08:00

Edmunds Middle School and 2 other schools in Vermont are piloting the use of laptop computers to personalize learning. Edmunds Middle School has 20% ELL and 41% of students on free or reduced lunches. They have very rich social studies and science classes.

The transition to internet connected personalize learning has been rocky. The wi-fi crashed frequently and the computers the school initially chose had connectivity problems. The frustration of the teachers is evident, but they all agree that they are teaching students in a way that prepares them for the future.

“There are days when things just don’t work, just don’t go well. I would have to say at the beginning of this year, I was probably the most frustrated I’ve been, because we were having real problems with our internet. I was this close to saying; it’s going to be paper and pen for the rest of the year. Because I felt like we just wasted so much time. We’ve given them so many different options for doing things that some times its overwhelming for them. And I think that there are some students who respond well to a very traditional, you know, here’s your paper, copy the assignment, its due tomorrow, at this time. That’s not always the way things happen around here. But I think that those options really mirror the choices that they are going to have outside of school and that this is better preparing them to be able to navigate and organize.” Teacher (no teachers are named in the video)

“The drawback is that they are not as focused as they once were. But the positive is this is the medium they are going to operate for the rest of their lives. They’re getting good at it, whether we like it or not. They’re better than I am, they’re better than you are. They’re better than our generation. And it does provide them with some really neat opportunities to get beyond the confines of a traditional classroom. They Skye with people in Uganda, they can have conferences with people across the city or within the country. They can converse with a videographer and exchange ideas. And that is something that didn’t exist 10 years ago. And kids are very excited about that.” Another teacher

Wonderful Youtube Channel For Classic Literature

2012-01-21T10:17:00.000-08:00

Highline Public Schools Student Focus Group

2012-01-15T05:42:00.000-08:00

Students from Evergreen, Tyee, Highline, and Mt Rainier campus high school talk about how important their relationships are with their teachers. They also talk about how engaged with the subject they are learning is important too.

Highline Public Schools Student Focus Group from tony wagner on Vimeo.

High School Lessons On Empathy

2012-01-12T19:23:00.000-08:00

At Banana Kelly HS in the South Bronx -- one of the poorest Congressional districts in America -- ninth grade students embarked on a curriculum centered on the experiences of refugees. In the process, they learned a great deal about their own world as well.

Washington State Needs to Add Infant Parent Development As An Essential Health Care Benefit

2012-01-06T11:27:00.000-08:00

Last month the President gave states the right to define essential benefits for insurance plans. I hope Washington state will consider expanding the well babypart of Washington State’s essential benefit. We know the importance of the first year of a child life. All new parents in this modern age of small families, not just low income parents, do not know enough about infant development. I would like to suggest that Washington include doula or doula training in the essential benefit. Doulas provide non-medical support for expecting mothers and new mothers for 6 weeksafter the birth.

Another essential benefit should be free group parenting classes for mothers and for fathers, separately and together for up to one year. I had insurance, but I also hired a midwife during my pregnancy. One of the best benefits to having a midwife was the comradery with her other clients. We met as a group during our pregnancies and for a few months after my son's birth. I needed advice for a lot longer, at least a year. I did babysit as a teenager, but as the youngest I wasn't around infants and did not really know even how to fold a diaper. I Also, when my son was about 5 months old he developed spots on his body. Two weeks earlier a fried of mine had come down with spots. Two weeks after going to a clinic my friend, who has a daughter one month younger than my son, came down with spots. She thought it was a reaction to medicine she was taking. Two weeks later, her baby and my son had the spots too. Both of us were so clueless, that it took another friend to call her mother, who said, that sure sounds like chickenpox. Duh. A parent group would have been so wonderful to have, I think.

Insurers provide smoking cessation classes, weight loss classes and various drug management classes. There is so much new research in brain development that all parents need more guidance. I hope you will consider convening a group to consider what insurance benefits all parents should have access to in order to make sure their child develops to their full potential. People don’t know what they don’t know. Parents don't always know what to look for or what to do for their child. A well crafted program that helps parents help their child to fully develop their cognitive abilities could be a big benefit to society

Michio Kaku Says America Has The Worst Education System Known To Science

2012-01-02T18:52:00.000-08:00

‎"Science is the engine of prosperity, from steam power to electricity to the laser to the transistor to the computer. However, the information revolution has a weakness, and the weakness is precisely the educational system. The United States has the worst educational system known to science. Our graduates regularly compete at the level of third world countries. But how come the scientific establishment of the United States doesn’t collapse. If we are producing a generation of dummies, if the stupid index of America keeps rising every year?

Let me tell you something, some of you may not know this, America has a secret weapon, that secret weapon is the H1B. Without the H1B, the scientific establishment of this county would collapse. Forget about Google, forget about Silicon Valley, there would be no Silicon Valley without the H1B. And you know what the H1B is? It’s the genius visa. You realize in the United States, 50% of all PhD candidates are foreign born. At my system, one of the biggest in the United States, 100% of the PhD candidates are foreign born. The United States is the magnet sucking up all the brains of the world. But now the brains are going back, they are going back to China, they are going back to India, and people are saying, Oh my God, there’s a Silicon Valley in India now, oh my God, there is a Silicon Valley in China. Duh! Where did it come from? It came from the United States. So don’t tell me science isn’t the engine of prosperity. The Wall Street Journal editorialized against a congressman who wanted to ban the H1B visa saying it was taking jobs from the American people. The Wall Street Journal said, look, there are no Americans who can take these jobs. These are at the highest level of high technology. They don’t take jobs away from Americans, they create entire industries.

And that is why we have an Achilles heel. That is the educational system. Sociologists are not going to be the ones determining the future of Silicon Valley, but physicists, engineers; we need more of them, not less."

The Latest Symphony of Science Video

2012-01-02T18:07:00.000-08:00

"A musical celebration of the importance and inspirational qualities of space exploration (human and robotic), as well as a look at some of the amazing worlds in our solar system. Featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Cox, and Carolyn Porco.

"Onward to the Edge" is the 12th installment in the Symphony of Science series."

World Peace Game

2011-12-25T08:28:00.000-08:00

John Hunter puts all the problems of the world on a 4′x5′ plywood board — and lets his 4th-graders solve them. At TED2011, he explains how his World Peace Game engages schoolkids, and why the complex lessons it teaches — spontaneous, and always surprising — go further than classroom lectures can.

Three minute trailer for a film about Teacher John Hunter's World Peace Game

Twenty minute TED talk about Teacher John Hunter's background and the path that led him to become a teacher.

Resolution for Puget Sound Skills Center funding

2011-12-12T14:48:00.000-08:00

On this Wednesday’s School Board meeting agenda there will be a resolution concerning funds for Puget Sound Skills Center.

RESOLUTION NO. 2477 - REQUEST TO OSPI FOR PRE-DESIGN MAJOR AND MINOR CAPITAL FUNDS FOR THE PUGET SOUND SKILLS CENTER. With the Superintendent's Recommendation:
That the Board approve the revised request to OSPI for minor capital funds in the amount of $950,000 for the 2013-15 biennium, pre-design funds in the amount of $1,100,000 for the 2013-15 biennium, and major capital construction funds in the amount of $21,800,000 for the 2013-15 biennium for the Puget Sound Skills Center.

The Board has not received much detail about the major capital expenditures. Principal Shields’ high level of summary of the project is for three phases:

1. Modernize infrastructure to accommodate new buildings. This includes a new boiler room/energy strategies etc. When this is completed, the new building adjacent to the parking lot on Highline property will be a Health Sciences building housing the Dental Clinic, Nursing, IT lab and wet lab for UW Natural Sciences curriculum. It will also feature a large multi-purpose room which is desperately needed since we don’t have a room that will accommodate half our student body, PE can take place there along with catered events which the culinary Arts program will use.
2. This phase will build a Construction Tech/Fire Sciences building – in the back parking lot. This will have room for fire equipment/trucks, construction projects etc.
3. The present shop building will be remodeled to accommodate larger classes/IT lab for two large programs: Automotive Tech and Auto Body. This phase also includes modernization of the present building – most of which is 39 years old.

I have not decided how I will vote. I support the construction of everything, except the Fire Science building and garage for the fire trucks. There a many fire stations and two fire training centers very near PSSC. Students should use community resources to train. Federal Way and Seattle Fire Training facilities will always have the latest training resources and be able to train students in the latest practices. I don’t even know why PSSC has two fire trucks. 16 and 17 year olds cannot drive fire trucks. Those trucks have tires, engines, oil and diesel, paint. All of these things need to be maintained. That garage will be nothing more than a museum for used fire truck. There are fire trucks in fire stations within blocks of PSSC. The fire program was an Explorer Scout Troop before PSSC opened a fire science program. That program used community facilities and so can PSSC’s program.

A 1986 Darley fire engine — will stay closer to home and serve at the Puget Sound Skills Center (PSSC), a school for career preparation and technical education in the Highline School District. Photo from SeatacBlog

The Port of Seattle's retired fire truck was donated to Puget Sound Skills Center's Fire Services program Tuesday morning (Sept. 6, 2011). Photo courtesy Highline School District.
From The B-townblog

The fire science program at Bates Technical College requires 5 credits of 100 level math. The prerequisite to the 100 level maths is intermediate algebra. If the fire science program included an applied intermediate algebra credit, I would have kinder feelings for it. Intermediate algebra is a high school level class that too many of our students either don’t take or fail. The PSSC Fire Services Program is setting our students up to pay for high school courses in college.

PSSC does not have a number of pre-apprenticeship training programs for local apprenticeships. For instance, Seattle light has apprenticeships for Cable Splicer, Electrician Constructor, Generation Electrician Constructor, Meter Electrician and Hydro-electric Maintenance Machinist .

Cable Splicer, Electrician Constructor, Generation Electrician Constructor and Meter Electrician applicants need at least one (1) year of high school training in electrical theory or at least one half (1/2) year high school training installing, configuring, maintaining or repairing electrical equipment. Hydro-electric Maintenance Machinist applicants need at least one (1) year of high school training in mechanical shop or machine shop. PSSC needs an electrical theory classes building.

The same issue about high school math applies to the Seattle Light or probably any apprenticeship program. Applicants for Cable Splicer, Hydroelectric Maintenance Machinist, Electrician Constructor, Generation Electrician Constructor, Meter Electrician, and Pre-apprentice Lineworker, must have successfully completed high school level Algebra, Geometry, or Trigonometry with a grade of "C" (70%) or above.

Emporium math would be great solution for math at PSSC. PSSC could leverage students’ interest in vocational courses to encourage students to continue their math and science education. Students could take their vocational classes 2 or 3 days a week and math 2 days a week in the learning lab.

An example of a model for vocational training is Edmunds Community College. Edmunds Community College has a successful training program for Boeing jobs where there are hands on training and an online portion to the program. Our students all need to learn how to learn online. A learning lab is a logical addition to vocational programs.

Pretty much nobody is hiring entry level firefighters. The firefighting program at PSSC does not teach students any useful skills to the current job market. The program does not prepare students for the college program, rather it graduates students who will need to pay for high school courses in college.

PSSC has many great programs that train students for jobs when they graduate high school. The culinary, construction and automotive programs are great examples. One student from the firefighting program got a job out of high school in Alaska, out of many hundreds of students. I think it is wrong to use taxpayer funds for a program that neither prepares students for a career nor sets them up for expensive high school courses in a college program.

Pick Your Poison, Bigger Classes or Fewer School Days

2011-12-07T10:35:00.000-08:00

The Washington State Legislature needs to cut at least $2Billion from the budget. It looks like every part of the budget will feel the cuts, education will be no exception. All day kindergarten is on the block. Levy Equalization is on the block. The state gives property poor districts more money in the form of levy equalization funds because their levies, when they can pass them, will not raise as much money.

The Washington State Superintendents Association has recommended that the legislature cut the number of school days to say money. Another option, I don't know who is championing it, is to increase class size in grades 4-12 by two students.

I received an email that said this: Should the district cancel classes such as AP Art History (seems like a complete waste of money to offer in HS to begin with but...), French V, etc because of not enough students? YES! If there are not students to support it, it should be canceled. Period. Colleges and Universities do it all the time because it is not cost effective. I also have to say your final statement about rural school districts not being able to offer these kinds of classes I doubt actually is even a problem. How many rural districts offer these anyway? My district is not rural, and absolutely pales in comparison to the AP classes offered by the neighboring districts. We can barely offer AP Calc or even 4 years of foreign language, let alone worry about whether some kid cannot take AP Art History or French V because only a few kids in the school want it. I think people in my district or the rural districts would love to have the problem of worrying about cutting AP Art History or AP Basket Weaving or whatever. IMHO, there are some courses that should be studied in college on the student's own dime, and certainly should not be offered in HS if there are not enough students to fill a class. FYI, I rather enjoyed Art History in college, and knew a lot about it, due in large part to my French teacher's love of French and renaissance art.

Here is my response: Should districts cancel classes. Heck no, we should be adding more classes like this. There are ways that innovative districts are adding these classes which maintain or reducing costs.

1) They synchronously teach one class at more than one school. In several Delaware school districts one teacher teaches two or three classes at the same time. The students watch her on large flat screen TVs via a system similar to Skye. The classes can see each other and email address are exchanged. The teacher switches the school she is physically at from time to time so each class experiences remote teaching and plans to have field trips where they all go together.

"When only six students sign up for a class—which is what happened with Advanced Placement Statistics at Conrad this year— it’s hard for a public school to justify assigning a faculty member to teach it. However, add those six Conrad students to the dozen who signed up at A.I. du Pont and you’ve got a right-sized AP class. The distance learning labs facilitated the solution: the Conrad students are taking the course that’s being taught from A.I. du Pont (high school). Similar considerations figured into the other distance learning classes: sociology (a college level class), Advanced Placement U.S. history and Advanced Placement comparative government are being taught from Conrad; accounting and two one-semester social studies classes, legal process and military history, are also being taught from A.I. du Pont."

2) In East Grand Rapids, MI, students take 3 language in one class taught by a teacher who teaches none of them. "In an attempt to offer more world languages, the district created a hybrid language class offering multiple courses during one class period. This year the class, taught by Kim Ibara, has one student taking first-year Japanese, two second-year Japanese, five first-year Chinese, three second-year Chinese, six first-year Arabic and three second-year Arabic. “It has been much more successful than I would have imagined,” said Ibara." I have been advocating a learning to learn any language class in Highline since I was elected. Foreign language, more than most other subjects, similarly to music, require more of the student than the teacher. A foreign language teacher can teach students the skills and help them find the resources and a mentor to learn any language.

3) Teach math in a learning lab, using the emporium math method developed by the National Center for Academic Transformation. Students learn on line with help on demand. Math teachers who know the subject can help a student who is learning geometry at one computer and an algebra student at another and a statistics student at another. This method has been successful at the community college level and some high schools in LA are experimenting with this model of instruction. WA school districts should too.

4) And there are fully on line asynchronous courses. All AP classes, and most colleges and universities have online courses. A learning lab is a great place for students to take those classes during the school day, with help available from volunteers. A lot of the problems students have with online courses are technical. They need help with their computer, are the Internet, or logging on, things that do not require course expertise, but can be solved by IT savvy people in a learning lab. Also, taking online courses during school hours keeps students with their peers and with adults who can encourage them. Win Win. Highline, and probably other school districts, offer these classes for credit recovery, why not give any student access?

The idea that we have to throw up our hands is not true. There are more options now than ever. We just need a legislative agenda that incentivize school districts to put their students education above old fashioned ideas.

Redesigning A Large Class To Be Engaging

2011-12-04T22:01:00.000-08:00

Carolyn Jarmon, from the National Center for Academic Transformation, talks about Redesigning Student Learning Environments at the Pearson Course Redesign Conference. This part of her talk dealt with the redesign model that is the most conservative model, the Replacement model. There were very few substantial changes in this course redesign of a large introductory class. The trick here is to require a pretest before class so that students read the book before they come to class instead of expecting the textbook to be taught in class. A question is put on the screen and students break into small groups to answer the question. The instructor asks students to choose what they think explains the question using a clicker. 23% of the questions in the traditional lecture model required reasoning vs. 67% in the redesigned course.

What is intriguing about this redesign is not that the class size is large. What is intriguing is that this redesign requires very little change. It requires very little of the teacher. The classroom is the same, the teacher is the same, the tools the teacher uses is the same, except for the addition of a clicker, which one of the easier technologies to learn. The only thing a teacher is asked to do differently is to give the test before he or she uses the material in class. Teachers can stand in front of the class, but now they guide the discussion after students have thought through a question with a small group.

"They still have large meetings of about 250 students but every student is required to take a pretest before the first class (of the week). You know what this means, it’s amazing. Students read the book. They come to class already engaged with the material at some level. Did they used to do that before? No. They came in waiting for the faculty member to tell them the book. This doesn’t happen anymore. They get a few points for the quiz. Principle, remember.

But during class, they have screens like this and they post a problem. An applied biology situation, one of the ones I know they use is smog. They post a little question at the end about smog. Then students talk in a small group. And this particular redesign uses clickers. That started in the sciences, it is now much more widespread, but they were the first. And students vote. Now, this is very useful. They pick which of the answers about question related to the vignette about smog was correct. Couple of things going on right here, engagement with the material and the faculty member can take a quick look. If nobody chooses A and A was wrong the faculty member says, good job, nobody choose A. Make A harder next time but, you know, A was clear. If half the students choose B and B is wrong also, then the faculty member can call on folks who choose B and say what did you choose B for? What is your justification? And then he or she can call on the people who didn’t choose B and say, why didn’t you choose B? So what we have is an ongoing conversation, in a big room, where students have thought through the content and discussed it in small groups, and it goes on from there.

This was an interesting set of outcomes. Notice. They found that the test questions got harder and harder because they knew students could handle the more difficult questions. They stopped asking factual questions to a great degree and started asking, for those of you who are familiar it, questions higher up on Bloom’s Taxonomy. They began to ask analytical, evaluative questions because the students have begun to think like that. This is Intro Biology, new freshman who just walked out of high school and into biology here. But, it’s a tougher, more in depth course than it used to be. And notice what happened to attendance. It suddenly became important to come to class, because no one was reading them the book, speaking them the book. They were in fact basing discussions on having already read the book."

What's Wrong With The Lecture?

2011-12-04T20:23:00.000-08:00

Carolyn Jarmon from the National Center from Academic Transformation explains what is wrong with lectures and why smaller classes do not make any difference.

TED: Emily Pilloton: Teaching design for change

2011-12-03T22:09:00.000-08:00

"Emily Pilloton and Project H Design move to small-town America, start teaching a high-school shop class, and find the power and impact of hyperlocal design."

There is a feature article about Emily Pilloton and her Project H students at Design Mind.

A Video About Being Bullied

2011-12-03T21:07:00.000-08:00

A while ago a blogger I read occasionally posted a bunch of videos by kids who were bullied at school. Taken together they were very powerful. Most of the anger of the students, in those videos, were directed at teachers and coaches. This kid is in his private hell. There are ~~thousands and thousands~~ too many videos like this on Youtube.

IM NOT GOING TO KILL MYSELF. I JUST NEED TO GET THIS OUT HERE.

How We Should Respond to the Budget Cuts in Education

2011-12-03T17:15:00.000-08:00

I just received this email. I think it is exactly right.

There is opportunity all over the place this session...everywhere from a charters bill, universal pre-k bill, effective teachers/principals bill - with real people, real groups with leverage supporting these issues. At the same time...we are facing unbelievable budget cuts.

I just can't personally see the point of spending time argueing over what to cut. It's all bad. We have to start thinking bigger and bolder and demanding more then what is the least bad.

· Talking about which thing we should cut is the wrong conversation.
· We must improve outcomes for kids
· And we must close the opportunity gap first.
· We don’t have money, and we won’t have more money, so we need to figure out how to do more with less.
· This means we have to change. And the change has to include:
o Starting earlier
o Moving every single teacher and Principal from good to great or moving them out
o Doing things differently – call them charters, call them innovative schools, but do it differently.
· We cannot be doing the same thing next year in education as we are this year. All we’ll have is less. We have to do it differently. It's up to you.

School Librarians As Gate Keepers

2011-12-03T16:24:00.000-08:00

I advocate for school library books to be classic books with expired copy rights that can be printed for $1-$2 each. Schools could just give the books to students and have take one leave one libraries to multiply the number of books a child can read.

I recently received this email response from a librarian:

"Is it better for children to read out of date copyfree books than new books? No. Those books are over 50 years old. And photocopying is not free—it takes staff time and paper and ink and copier costs and depreciation. And current non-fiction books are much more reliable than unmonitored student selected internet sources.

"Is it better for students to use Wikipedia and other online sources rather than non-fiction books? No, unless a student knows how to get to reliable resources that they will read. I don’t think elementary students can easily discern accuracy and reliability—but a qualified teacher-librarian can provide well researched books and websites (like Usborne, Capstone, etc.). What reading level are the articles in Wikipedia? All over the place.

"Is it better for all the books in the library be in the hands of students at all times with not much left on the shelves? Count how many books per student per week—about 20. That is too much for one student to handle and parents would be up in arms trying to manage all those books. An average elementary has a collection of 10,000 volumes.

"Is it better to limit the number of books to a lower amount and provide less variety and choice for independent student reading? No. Students need to choose what they want to read and at their recreational reading level (different than instructional reading level) so that they will practice reading to gain fluency.

"Is a book exchange better than selecting from a well balanced collection of books in the school library and classrooms? No. Who would evaluate appropriateness, reliability of information, etc.? Who would guide students towards books that match the individual students’ interests and reading level?

"Research is the scientific method for evaluating the effectiveness of programs. I could quote you valid research studies to support these statements (Krashen, Lance, Loertscher, Eisenberg, and more). It is important to look at the long-term effects on student learning of any proposed changes."

______________________________________________________________________________

David Weinberger - Author of The Cluetrain and Everything is Miscellaneous - Talks about how the internet changes education and libraries
______________________________________________________________________________

Here is my response about librarians:

I say yes to all of your points.

There is a reason copy free books have been in continous print for over 50 years. They are great books. I saw Stephen King on C-Span the other day. Someone asked him if any books had influenced him. He said his mother read him The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when he was 8 or 9. He described the passage that still sticks with him. So many wonderful books, that are the backbone of American culture, are considered with anti-intellectual distain now because they are "old". Any child who has heard of the Hunger Games can go to a public library to read it or check it out in audio books over the web. Are school librarians teaching students how to download books?

Non-fiction books are not error free. Students need to be taught the same basic rules of research when they use books as the web. Too many non-fiction books are written by professional writers with no passion or education in the subject and are deadly dull and superficial, especially school library non-fiction books. Their covers are pretty though. I question librarians ability as the arbitor of a child's taste. Give them access to good literature, give them a list of classic movies, teach students about fair use and how to verify facts.

Wikipedia is not the only go to source. How about http://edsitement.neh.gov/, http://sheg.stanford.edu/?q=node/45, http://www.historylink.org/Index.cfm?DisplayPage=education/Edu-Curriculum.cfm, http://www.loc.gov/index.html, and http://www.moma.org/modernteachers/guides.html It is tragic that our students do not have access to this. When the BP oil spill happened, what non-fiction books could you provide students in order to help them understand all of the issues that incident created for all Americans? That was such a lost opportunity in education, by teachers and librarians.

Amazon has print on demand for $5/books. However, there are copiers that can print perfect bound books, that are perfectly adequate, for $1-$2 per book. I don't picture librarians standing at the copier. Printing can be contracted out and purchased in the same way as books from any other publisher.

Author Peter Gills says Wikipedia is the non-fiction writer's best friend. Peter Gill wrote, "I should introduce a note of caution about notes of caution - specifically, about a phenomenon I've seen in opinion pieces about Wikipedia: the questioning of the website's reliability. Perhaps because it's free, and we don't believe anything good can be, we generally accept the idea that Wikipedia is riven with flaky and hoax information, somehow a risky place to be relying on for your research. Guess what? Without irony, these articles invariably lack supporting data on this point. In the last few months I've read thousands of pages, followed many citation links, and externally cross-checked many facts. I believe errors in Wikipedia are really rather rare."

There is the story, I heard from Cable Green, that when the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia were compared they had the same number of errors. But, he said, the day after that report came out all the errors in Wikipedia were fixed. Look up Pluto in your non-fiction books. Is Pluto a planet in the books on the shelves in the school library?

School librarians are holding back technology adoption in schools. Librarians are gate keepers. Our students need to learn where all the good stuff is on the internet and how to fact check what they read, whether it is in the newspaper, on televison, in non-fiction books or on the internet. And the fact is that most people use the internet to fact check newspapers, television, and non-fiction books. Librarians need to embrace today's world. We manage to teach students about sex, why is the thought of teaching students about the internet even more controversial than sex education?

JiJi Apps for the IPad

2011-12-01T19:31:00.000-08:00

Mind Research has four apps for the IPad featuring JiJi. BigSeed and KickBox each cost $1.99 each. There are also BigSeed Lite and KickBox Lite apps that are free.

BigSeed's "goal is to unfold the colored "seed" tiles to perfectly fill all the empty cells. Sound easy? Try to get through all ten levels without overheating your cerebral cortex to near boiling levels. If your scorched neurons force you to raise the white flag in defeat, it'll be infuriating to know that 2nd graders across the country charge through the whole thing as the culmination of MIND Research's award-wining ST Math curriculum!"

KickBox is "An addictive multistep thinking game from MIND Research Institute's math curriculum featuring JiJi™ the penguin. The goal is to position lasers and mirrors to knock all balls out of the penguin's path. The puzzles start off easy, but get progressively more challenging as you move through the seven intriguing levels."

First Book, a worth charity

2011-11-30T09:08:00.000-08:00

The New York Times is giving its recommendations of worth charities. This one caught my eye.

"First Book

"A teacher in a poor neighborhood once told Kyle Zimmer that when she asked her students to bring in a book from home, three of them brought in a phone book — the only book in their house. We commonly assume that families who don’t have books are that way because they aren’t interested in reading. But very often, the reason is that they can’t afford books. Ms. Zimmer started the organization First Book to put books in the hands of low-income children in the United States. To date, it has distributed free or at low cost more than 85 million books, mostly through charitable groups that work with poor children.

"If you give books to children who don’t have them, good things happen — they become interested in reading, and they read more. Having lots of books in the home is as good a predictor of children’s future educational achievement as their parents’ educational levels. But good things also happen to the publishing industry: First Book has harnessed its large network of education programs to create a guaranteed market and persuade publishers to make low-cost versions of some 2,000 titles — allowing publishers to reach the 42 percent of American children who t were not in their market before. Fifty dollars buys 20 books for a child who has none."

Next Gen, 20 recommendations to the UK government for transforming technology talent

2011-11-29T16:24:00.000-08:00

The 20 points of Next Gen. Transforming the UK into the world’s leading talent hub for the video games and visual effects industries from The Department for Culture, Media and Sport

There is an excellent video on vimeo about the effect that incorporating programming can have throughout all subjects in schools. The owner of the video restricted where the video can be embedded and my US Blogger domain is among the restricted domains. http://vimeo.com/19293381

Recommendation 1: Bring computer science into the National Curriculum as an essential discipline.

Recommendation 2: Sign up the best teachers to teach computer science through Initial Teacher Training bursaries and ‘Golden Hellos’.

Recommendation 3: Use video games and visual effects at school to draw greater numbers of young people into STEM and computer science.

Recommendation 4: Set up a one-stop online repository and community site for teachers for video games and visual effects educational resources.

Recommendation 5: Include art and computer science in the English Baccalaureate.

Recommendation 6: Encourage art-tech crossover and work-based learning through school clubs.

Recommendation 7: Build a network of STEMNET and Teach First video games and visual effects Ambassadors.

&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Your browser does not support iframes.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;

Recommendation 8: Introduce a new National Video Games Development and Animation Schools Competition.

Recommendation 9: Design and implement a Next Generation Video Games and Visual Effects Talent Careers Strategy.

Recommendation 10: Provide online careers-related resources for teachers, careers advisers and young people.

Recommendation 11: Develop kite marking schemes, building on Skillset accreditation, which allow the best specialist HE courses to differentiate themselves from less industry-relevant courses.

Recommendation 12: The Higher Education Funding Council England (HEFCE) should include industry-accredited specialist courses in their list of ‘Strategically Important and Vulnerable’ subjects (SIVs) that merit targeted funding. Industry commits to these courses through industrial scholarships and support for CPD for lecturers.

Recommendation 13: Raise awareness of the video games and visual effects industries in the eyes of STEM and arts graduates.

Recommendation 14: Give prospective university applicants access to meaningful information about employment prospects for different courses.

Recommendation 15: Develop a template for introducing workplace simulation into industry-accredited video games and visual effects courses, based on Abertay University’s Dare to be Digital competition.

Recommendation 16: Leading universities and Further Education (FE) colleges sponsor a high-tech creative industries University Technical College (UTC), with clear progression routes into HE.

Recommendation 17: Kite mark FE courses that offer students the best foundation in skills and knowledge to progress into Higher Education.

Recommendation 18: Skillset Creative Media Academies and e-skills UK’s National Skills Academy for IT to work with industry to develop specialist CPD training for video games and visual effects industries.

Recommendation 19: Support better research-oriented university-industry collaborations in video games and visual effects.

Recommendation 20: Continue to treat the 18 visual effects occupations on the Government’s shortage list as shortage occupations.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport responded with a report, The Government's response to Next Gen. Transforming the UK into the world’s leading talent hub for the video games and visual effects industries

David McCullough talks about history textbooks

2011-11-26T12:25:00.000-08:00

David McCullough says that No Child Left Behind is no excuse to not teach history. There is a lot of great historical literature that are exciting for students and teachers. He ends with the Jefferson quote, "If a Nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be...."

“The textbooks, alas, are by and large very dreary. The sad part is there are wonderful things children could be reading today in history in the schools at every level. The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body, FrederickDouglass’s autobiography, BenFranklin’s autobiography, the speeches of ChiefJoseph, Lincoln’s second inaugural address, Grant’s memoirs, selections from Shelby Foote and Barbara Tuchman, and the wonderful prose of Francis Parkman’s theOregon Trail, the list could be indefinite, MartinLuther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, on and on, these are all not only major events in the history of our country, they are great literature, they have survived the test of time.” The hyperlinks are to free online editions.

We Should Offer A No Layoff Clause to Teachers' Union While Redesigning Education

2011-11-25T09:03:00.000-08:00

Today, economist Robert Reich wrote, "Not to depress you, but our economic troubles are likely to continue for many years — a decade or more." We need to make big changes. Teachers say they feel like they are under siege. The fact is most teachers will not be laid off but we need to strike a bargain between teachers and school districts that tie our fates together in order to make the big changes we need. More than 30% of teachers are 50 years old and over 5% are over 61. The only way to reduce the cost of education is to reduce the labor force. Some people keep insisting that we need to raise taxes to spend more on education instead. That is not going to happen. And even if taxpayers are willing to spend more money, school districts are obligated to use that money wisely. Technology has increased productivity in every other profession. The National Center for Academic Transformation and the Rocketship Charter School Management Organization have proved that a learning lab can increase achievement while dramatically reducing costs.

School districts have cut back on new curriculum adoption, field trips, arts education, drivers education, replacing and updating lab equipment, investing in material for the drama departments, etc. A little bit of money is not going to be enough. We need to reduce labor costs by redesigning instructional methods.

I sent the following letter to Washington State Superintendent Randy Dorn and a copy to Washington Education Association President Mary Lindquist.

Dear Superintendent Dorn,
One of the suggestions for the budget this year is to increase class size. I heard you speak at the WSSDA conference and I heard how concerned you are for the teachers who would lose their job. Washington State needs to increase student achievement and reduce costs. I would like to suggest that Washington go bold. In order to reduce costs, teachers do need to teacher more students. You are a union person, as am I, at heart. OSPI needs to develop a plan, with the WEA, that school districts can implement voluntarily that would use the models developed by the National Center for Academic Transformation to reduce cost and increase student achievement. The bold part of the plan is that school districts would offer their education associations a 10 year no layoff clause for redesigning their instructional methods.

&amp;lt;br /&amp;gt; &amp;lt;p&amp;gt;Your browser does not support iframes.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;
Governor Gregoire, Washington Education Association President Mary Lindquist, Washington State Superintendent Randy Dorn

You have talked about the need for education to use adaptive software. Modularized, adaptive software is central to the National Center for Academic Transformation. There is nothing sacred about how the school day is organized. Elementary students do not need to spend their day with one generalist teacher. All primary teachers are not prepared to teach STEM. Music is taught by a specialist teacher. No amount of professional development can get a generalist elementary teacher up to speed to teach the clarinet. Elementary STEM education should be taught by a specialist teacher similar to music, even if it is taught only once or twice a week by teacher and students spend the rest of the week using adaptive software.

We need to reduce cost and increase student achievement. Reducing costs in education means that teachers will need to teach more students. Technology can be used to provide students with quality modularized adaptive education in a way that allows for smaller classes when students are with the teacher, while reducing costs. OSPI can provide the leadership by negotiating this with the WEA and then presenting the plan to school districts to adopt voluntarily. You have the unique background to be able to do this. I hope you will consider this.

iPhone Application Developer... and 6th Grader

2011-11-16T14:13:00.000-08:00

"Thomas Suarez is a 6th grade student at a middle school in the South Bay of Los Angeles. When Apple released the Software Development Kit (SDK), he began to create and sell his own applications. "My parents, my friends and even the people at the Apple store all supported me," he says, "and Steve Jobs inspired me". Thomas points out that it's hard to learn how to make an app. "For soccer you could go to a soccer team ... but what if you want to make an app?" He's started a club for fellow students at school, where he shares his knowledge of programming. Thomas articulates his vision that students are a valuable new technology resource to teachers, and should be empowered to offer assistance in developing the technology curriculum and also assist in delivering the lessons.

"Thomas has been fascinated by computers and technology since before kindergarten. Recently, he's been focused on the development of applications for the iPhone, and has established his own company, CarrotCorp http://www.carrotcorp.com/. His most successful application is one he terms "an anti-Justin-Bieber game" called "Bustin Jieber". "It's is a variation on the Whac-a-Mole theme," he explains. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bustin-jieber/id404956571?mt=8

Science Education At UMBC under Freeman Hrabowski

2011-11-14T13:16:00.000-08:00

This is a wonderful program. We need to teach our students like this

It is Geography Awareness Week

2011-11-14T13:04:00.000-08:00

"Educator Daniel Raven-Ellison provides information for Geography Awareness Week 2011 on Mission Explore as well as concepts of Guerrilla Geography to teachers."

"Mission:Explore has a purpose. We think that the world is awesome and that making sense of it is important. We do this through an approach to exploring, questioning, playing, experimenting and experiencing our planet we call guerrilla geography. Our children’s activities are developed to encourage creative and critical thinking about the world in which they live while having a great deal of fun.

"We think it’s important that children are encouraged to play and learn outdoors, that they have positive and role models and that they learn to be kind to themselves, other people, wildlife and the environment. It’s for these reasons that Pink Stinks, WWF, nef, National Geographic, Play England Orange and lots of other people have given us praise, approval or awards."

Teachers Write their Own Textbooks

2011-11-12T18:31:00.000-08:00

Teachers in the Anoka-Hennepin School District in Minnesota wrote their new math text book. The school district had budgeted $200,000 to buy new books when the teachers came up with the idea to write their own. The new online text books cost $10,000 to write and $5,000 to print copies for students without internet access.

To see the Anoka-Hennepin online statistics text, register as a guest here: http://bit.ly/s2jTSb

The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) LearningMedia website has videos and games teachers could embed in other online textbooks.

According to the article in the Minnesota Star Tribune, "Engelhaupt, one of the Anoka teachers, said it's already clear some of the chapters need to be tweaked over the summer. Once that's done, the district plans to make the online curriculum available to other districts for free.

'If every school district looked at doing this for all of their classes, the money saved would be just unbelievable,' he said."

The FIZZ Institute Helps Teachers Flip Their Classroom

2011-11-11T18:11:00.000-08:00

The Friday Institute at NC State University has developed a program that makes it easier for teachers to flip the classroom.

Your browser does not support iframes.

Rocketship Schools featured on NBC

2011-11-08T19:22:00.000-08:00

NBC Bay Area September 2011 from Rocketship Education on Vimeo.

How Learning Labs Can Change Education

2011-11-08T09:12:00.000-08:00

A school teacher-librarian wrote me to say that libraries already function as learning labs. Some teacher librarians may be qualified to apply for this new position as a Learning Lab Supervisor, or whatever the new position will be called. The Learning Lab, as I envision it, will be a place where students learn in a blended learning model with help on demand from parent and community volunteers, teachers who do not have a class at that time, and community based organizations. The Learning Lab Supervisor's primary responsibility will be to coordinate and supervise the volunteers and manage the lab, not to teach.

A teacher asked me if I could give her the number of a teacher to ask about what it is like to have a 150 classroom size class. I pointed out that I said 150 student load, class sizes will be no more than 16 students, in some subjects it can be lower. The way to do this is for students to meet with the teacher 1 - 2 times a week in the class. The other 3 to 4 periods a week students go to the Learning Lab. Students in the Learning Lab watch or read the information that the teacher would deliver in a lecture or practice their skills such as writing or working problems in math and science and other computation subjects.

John.Squires@ChattanoogaState.EDU or any of these National Center for Academic Transformation Scholars. http://www.thencat.org/RedesignAlliance/Bios.htm can attest to this.

The redesign would not be a one year transformation. This would take several years to phase in. The province of New Brunswick brought in Partnership for 21st Century Skills to help them. It would be great if Washington could bring in some organization that has successfully led teachers and school districts in similar transformation. Another organization could be the National Center for Transformation, although they focus on our 18 years old community college students who our high schools have failed to educate. Another could be Cisco or Pearson.

There is nothing sacred about 5 - 50 minute periods spent with a teacher. Private music students spend 50 minutes per week with their private teacher and the rest of the week practicing. We think that is perfectly natural. That is the model for the future of education.

Letter to the Legislature For Learning Labs

2011-11-07T13:01:00.000-08:00

I just sent this letter to my legislators and people on Ways and Means. We need to start writing them now about our ideas for how they can help preserve education in the light of the budget facing them this session.

This session the legislature may consider shortening the school year. I hope you will not. If the economic situation is a new norm then we need to come up with ways to deal with this that do not make things worse. I have a suggestion that has been shown to reduce costs and improve student achievement. Washington needs to start leveraging technology for efficiency and efficacy at schools, in the same way as other places have.

Learning Lab in Minnesota

I suggest that the legislature allow schools to have students attend learning labs for up to half of the school day. A learning lab is a place where students learn in ways that does not require a teacher present, or at least allows more students to per teacher. Students in a learning lab could engage in silent reading, watch educational videos, or use adaptive software on a computer. The learning lab could be staffed by someone whose job it would be to coordinate parent and community volunteers and educational staff. A learning lab would need to be defined so that it is a new entity. This will allow school districts to negotiate with the union about the responsibility of the staffing positions.

Higher ed in other states have used learning labs to improve student achievement and reduce costs per student. Michael Young, President of the University of Washington, recently said on KUOW’s Weekday “… if you look at some of this blended technology, (students are finishing courses) in seven weeks, as opposed to fourteen weeks, they are passing at 85% to 90% rates, rather than 30 and 40% rates. That has not only enormous efficiency, if you do that you really are increasing your output four times, but it also has dramatic effectiveness increases, kids are learning more, retaining more, (and) retaining that longer. There is almost a moral obligation to look in that area as much as a financial obligation.”

Learning Lab at Liberty High School in Las Vegas

I do think we have a moral obligation to use technology to solve this crisis in education funding. Creating a learning lab and new staffing position in K12 education would be a far better solution than cutting the school year. Help school districts innovate in education by using technology in this way so that we can improve student outcomes and reduce cost while providing a full year and full school day of quality education.

Teacher Accountability Plans

2011-11-06T19:36:00.000-08:00

I would like to make the case against teacher accountability plans.

There are over 200 school districts in WA, all trying to come up with a teacher accountability plan. Teachers are anxious, teachers feel under attack, there is push back, and what do we hope to get from this plan? Most teachers are pretty good. There are probably less than 10% of teacher that this plan will positively affect in terms of raising student achievement, or exiting poor teachers. Over 90% of teachers are as good in Highline as anywhere. Let’s let other districts go through the angst of building a teacher accountability plan and if some place comes up with a good one that results in improved student achievement let’s copy that. Every school district does not need to invent the same wheel.

Whenever there is an article in the paper about schools, the comments section is filled with comments hating on parents. Many, if not most, of the comments are written by teachers. Why did we stop thinking that schools were meritocracies and begin thinking that ignorance was an incurable condition inherited by parents, in 5 year olds? I thought schools are the way out of poverty and a tough life. Now, unless a kid has a perfect parent they are doomed. This attitude toward parents indicates that teachers feel helpless. I don’t blame the teachers, or the parents or the 5 year olds. The job of teacher is not doable.

We need to redesign our classrooms to leverage technology to provide individualized, personalized, competency based instruction to each student. We need to redesign classrooms to increase the number of students per teacher to lower costs per student. School districts are not spending money on students. The curriculum is old, out of date, or the school district does not support teaching certain core subjects altogether. Our students need a focused core student-directed academic curriculum. There is no way to get there from the traditional classroom. Our teachers have tried, and we have not made enough headway in improving just reading, writing and math.

So instead of spending time, energy and straining union-management relations on teacher accountability, which will just support the status quo, Highline needs to spend the time, energy and strain union-management relations on developing a redesign of instructional processes in the classroom. New instructional processes should be the wheel Highline invents. This is just my 2 cents.

"Dr. Brad Hoge is the Director of HUNSTEM and an Assistant Professor of natural science and science education in the Department of Natural Sciences at The University of Houston - Downtown. Dr. Hoge teaches science content courses for pre-service teachers at the University of Houston -- Downtown (UHD). These courses incorporate project-based learning (PBL) into instruction, and utilize web-based learning community tools from HUNSTEM (Houston Urban Network for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) into classroom projects. He has a M.Ed. in curriculum and instruction and post-baccalaureate teacher certification in both Texas and Louisiana. Dr. Hoge's PhD is in biogeochemistry. He conducts research with undergraduate students focusing on the ecological succession of mitigated wetlands.

"The New Century Energy Game (NCE) developed by Tietronix, Inc. for the Houston Independent School District (HISD) is a immersive micromanagement computer game which will provide a potentially transformative learning experience to 8-10th grade students. NCE combines aspects of strategy games and construction and management games, requiring players to build energy companies that must meet the needs of cities throughout the US over the next 50 years.

"The talk will focus particularly on how GBL is capable of accomplishing the lofty goals of inquiry-based teaching and problem-based learning. NCE will take smart gaming to the next level by encouraging the promises of PBL through GBL. NCE will fulfill the promise of PBL/GBL by not only engaging students in content lessons, but also in the "construction" of advanced knowledge and skills. This will make NCE transformative not only for student learning and constructivist pedagogy, but also for technology integration into the classroom and learning community involvement in curriculum development."

How to Tell People They Sound Racist

2011-10-29T05:23:00.000-07:00

Treat them like they took your wallet, hold them accountable. The conversation needs to be, I don't care who you are, I care what you did.

Democratic Education

2011-10-28T18:47:00.000-07:00

More information about Democratic Education.

In a society based on democracy, participation, and engagement, shouldn't education be democratic, participatory, and engaging? How can young people be creative, curious, and collaborative learners when their schooling boxes them in with testing and standardization? What does a more empowering, democratic education look like?

Check out this video by IDEA - the Institute for Democratic Education in America, and visit our website to learn more and get involved: http://www.democraticeducation.org

Remember: educational change starts with all of us - young people, teachers, parents, and more.

Make your voice heard!

- For more information about the statistics mentioned in the video, go to the Democratic Education Library.

Technology in the Classroom

2011-10-26T10:59:00.000-07:00

and I would like to suggest that we look at how technology can be part of each topic. We can provide access to content and opportunity for involvement to all stakeholders using technology.

For instance, we all want more parental engagement. This is a topic that comes up at almost every meeting. If we think of how we can address this issue by using technology we might come up with something along these lines.

Parents should read to their kids, help with homework, volunteer or be involved at their child’s school. All of these goals can be facilitated by improving the district or the school web sites.

1. Finish and put all the bells and whistles on the Student Information System

2. Links to homework help websites or contact emails. For instance, for about $10,000 - $15,000 the district could but on its server all the useful educational modules from http://www.wisc-online.com/. For student use. The modules cost $15.00 a piece.

3. A list of links to books, movies, video games, television shows can be compiled and put on the web site. Not a list of the names of books and movies, etc, but a list where students and parents can read or download the actual book or watch the movie or documentary. We talk all the time about how parents should do this or that, so let’s use the power of the internet to put it on the web site. There are great web sites that can provide help for all parents with at-home preparation we have said we wish they would. Open Culture is a good place to start.

4. Links to all the social services that Highline Staff refer and collaborate with.

5. Use social networking to facilitate parents and school administration and Community Schools in getting to know each other and to communicate, instead of the am coffee meetings. If the District can get 10 people to show at the am parent meetings it is a big deal. Social media has the potential to give everyone equal access to get to know teachers and to communicate asynchronously.

6. Put the class schedules online

7. Put the K12 curriculum guides for each subject on line

8. Publicize the offer of low cost internet by Comcast for families with a student on free and reduced lunch.

9. Approve policies that encourage teachers to increase the use of email and cloud computing to reduce the need for students to own specialized software and peripheral devices such as printers.

10. Student led conferences can go online as student blogs. Students can post their work, using school scanners, microphones, or cameras and discuss what they are doing and where they are going in text, photos, audio, or video. Parents and teachers can post comments. This might lead to more ongoing communication between parents and students and teachers.

I would also like to propose we focus on content when we talk about increasing technology in the classroom, instead of hardware.

A concern that came up from teachers when we were discussing the new math curriculum is lesson preparation. We have a taste of how technology is commonly used in classrooms in our work studies. A page that we have in our hands is projected on the screen and read out loud to us. The projected image adds nothing new. Former Superintendent Welsh said the district has not figured out the best way to integrate technology into lessons. A focus on content would help teachers with classroom preparation and would allow access to lesson plans and curriculum content to students and parents at home.

If we think a longer school day would be beneficial then providing 24/7 access to curricula material is one way to begin expanding the school day. If we think teaching students to collaborate is a good thing, providing ways for them to do it using technology will be a benefit to them. The use of technology would provide teachers with a way to track which student does what part of each online project, through the use of passwords and cookies on computers.

Technology is a way we can increase parental engagement, increase rigor and relevance, and provide a path for community partnerships and mentoring. Technology would take us away from face to face delivery of information and communication, but it would expand the numbers of students and parents who have access to curricula and the ability to communicate about school with students, other parents and with teachers.

Richard Elmore - The Current and Future of Education

2011-10-21T20:52:00.000-07:00

I have just discovered the ideas of Harvard researcher Richard Elmore. He says, "If you don't have a way of connecting instruction to management, organization, and accountability, you're behaving irresponsibly." He advises focusing on those things that make the instructional core work.

What this means, says Elmore, is there are basically only three ways you can increase learning and performance:

increase the knowledge and skill of teachers
change the content
alter the relationship of the student to the teacher and the content

"The instructional core helps us identify where we're trying to improve," explains Elmore. "The teacher, the student, the content – if you change one, you have to change them all." He elaborates:

"You can't alter the skill and knowledge of the teacher when you stay in a low-level curriculum. If you alter the content without changing the skill and knowledge of teachers, you are asking teachers to teach to a level that they don't have the skill and knowledge to teach to. If you do either one of those things without changing the role of the student in the instructional process, the likelihood that students will ever take control of their own learning is pretty remote."

Education Week ran a series called The Future of Education. Richard Elmore wrote in his article, What Would Happen If We Let Them Go:

"As I read the collected entries in the Futures of School Reform Blog, they seem bright, energetic, combative, and optimistic about the future of the enterprise of American public schooling. I wonder, as I read them, whether the writers are aware of what classrooms in American secondary schools actually look like--the dismal, glacial, adult-centered, congenially authoritarian, mindless soup in which our children spend the bulk of their days...

"I wonder, finally, what would happen if we simply opened the doors and let the students go; if we let them walk out of the dim light of the overhead projector into the sunlight; if we let them decide how, or whether, to engage this monolith? Would it be so terrible? Could it be worse than what they are currently experiencing? Would adults look at young people differently if they had to confront their children on the street, rather than locking them away in institutions? Would it force us to say more explicitly what a humane and healthy learning environment might look like? Should discussions of the future of school reform be less about the pet ideas of professional reformers and more about what we're doing to young people in the institution called school?"

Student Driven Learning, The EAST Initiative and National Issues Forums

2011-10-20T20:47:00.000-07:00

There is nothing more important in education than students taking control of their learning. The Cincinnati Public Schools credits several strategies for closing the achievement gap. One strategy they list is requiring service learning so that students feel an investment in their community and learn how important they are to the community.

When the National School Board Association T+L conference came to Seattle a couple of years ago I attended a workshop there about the EAST Initiative. The East Initiative is a service learning class where students form groups to solve problems or create some benefit for their community. The class is student run, with a teacher only acting as a facilitator. The students who led the workshop were amazing. One project they reported about was a study of school bus routes. They came up with a new dispatch system that reduced the time students spent on the bus and saved their school district money in gas.

This video is an introduction to the EAST Initiative. Only a few states have schools with EAST classes. Washington is not one. The second video is about social studies/language arts curriculum that I just heard of today. It is the National Issues Forums. If students cannot take a service learning class, this program looks like a very good alternative.

"What is EAST?

"The EAST Initiative is a nonprofit organization that provides new ways of learning for modern students.

"The EAST model of education features student-driven service projects accomplished with the latest in technology. EAST classrooms are equipped with state-of-the-art workstations, servers, software, and accessories, including GPS/GIS mapping tools, architectural and CAD design software, 3D animation suites, and much more. Students find problems in their local communities, and then use these tools to solve them.

"EAST’s focus, however, is not on technology itself, but on the unique learning environment of the EAST classroom. In EAST, students are responsible for creating their own lesson plans. There are no lectures and no tests; instead, the students are guided by an EAST facilitator (a teacher trained in the EAST process). This radically different approach to learning yields tremendous results. Students are better-prepared for both college and the business world, and they care more about learning and serving their communities."

"National Issues Forums (NIF) is a nonpartisan, nationwide network of locally sponsored forums for citizens to discuss what to do about important issues. When you use NIF in your classroom, you're giving your students the opportunity to actively participate in democratic practice. Students will learn to deliberate important social issues in a nonpartisan, non-confrontational way. They will learn to understand different points of view and reach conclusions, or directions for action, that benefit their communities.

"NIF provides a cost-effective way to meet national standards in social studies and language arts and, teach students how to be active citizens."

How can a high school skills center help the region’s economy?

2011-10-11T20:36:00.000-07:00

Dr. Shields sent me a copy of this piece she wrote about the Puget Sound Skills Center. I wrote a guest editorial for the Seattle Times advocating that students earn college credit in high school. Students are capable of college work and college credit earned in high school can make the transition to college easier and cheaper. The Puget Sound Skill Center courses do this. Students can earn college credit or a industry certificate in PSSC courses. Also PSSC offers a University of Washington in High School Oceanography class where students can earn 5 UW credits. Dr. Shields reminded me that PSSC is getting students college credit in high school.

How can a high school skills center help the region’s economy?

By Sue Shields, Puget Sound Skills Center Director Fall 2011
(Inspiration from Dr. William Symonds, “Pathways to Prosperity”)

The Puget Sound Skills Center (PSSC) staff would like its area residents to know how a Career and Technical educational (CTE) school can help with the economic downturn. There are multiple reports and research letting the public knows there is a skills gap which is affecting the American economy. The user friendly definition of a skills gap means there are jobs available but not enough workers with necessary skills to fill the jobs. PSSC believes its CTE programs meet this need in King County, Washington.

1. CTE programs ALL have college credit for students via agreements with colleges – for free or low cost. These agreements help students obtain college credits while in high school which make for an easy transition to college and save students time and money.

2. Business and Industry certifications are available in most programs offering students higher quality skills preparation in a real world environment and preparation for their next career step. A certification ensures prospective employers the provided training programs are relevant and up to industry standards. All programs have Advisory Committees reflecting the business or industry which meet four times per year.

3. PSSC instructors are all trained in their business/industry – they know their content/field and provide a unique network for student internships, college and careers.

4. The “hook” of CTE keeps students in high school. For example, the all-day credit recovery VITAL program had a 95% graduation rate in June 2011. These students were successful in their CTE programs prior to acceptance into VITAL and participated in the statewide Jobs for Washington’s Graduates program (JWG).

5. PSSC students are motivated and interested in their programs – they choose to be here so consequently are dedicated and committed to excellence. They enjoy their relationships with their instructors and other students who are like minded.

6. The climate/environment at PSSC is exceptional for learning skills needed in each program. Over the years, student testimonials say they are treated like adults, learn skills that will benefit them throughout their working career and feel safe and accepted at PSSC.

7. The CTE programs meet the needs of Washington’s businesses and industries – reducing the existing skills gaps.

8. PSSC’s focus is on both college and careers while integrating academic and a hands on education and training.

Flipped Classroom Nings

2011-10-09T06:36:00.000-07:00

Ning is a social website, similar to Facebook, but is self contained. Schools can have a Ning where only students and teachers can post, for instance. I ran across this list of Nings the other day for teachers who are interested in flipping the classroom.

&amp;lt;br /&amp;gt; &amp;lt;p&amp;gt;Your browser does not support iframes.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;

The Flipped Calculus Class

2011-10-08T10:42:00.000-07:00

USAToday has an article about a flipped calculus class. This is emporium math by another name.

"'It's about changing the dynamic of how you deliver the instruction,' says Roshan, who teaches at the private Bullis School near Washington, D.C. She began flipping her AP calculus classes last fall after finding she couldn't cover all the required material. Even topics she covered "didn't really all sink in."

Roshan now finishes the course a month in advance and uses the extra time for review. The number of students scoring a perfect "5" on the AP exam has risen, she says. Students watch lessons at home, sometimes two or three times, and replay confusing sections. If they're still confused, they query a friend. If that doesn't work, they ask Roshan the following day."

Modernizing History Curriculum

2011-10-05T09:36:00.000-07:00

From a Highline School District Staff member:

"Anyway, last Thursday I went to open house at Kilo M.S. for Andrew, my 6^th grader. Would you believe the social studies book they are using is the exact same one (his wife) used in Jr. High? (copyright 1987) It has a chapter on the Soviet Union and the “present” includes sections about the Communist Party and the emerging westernization of Baghdad. I was mortified. (See attached) I have to admit, as a parent seeing this it was the first time I had ever questioned sending my kids to public schools. And yet, I know we have similar books of similar ages in our school."

Here is my response:

All of our school districts could upgrade today. There are so many resources out there. SAS Curriculum Pathways is a free grade 6-14 core curriculum covering LA, math, social studies, Spanish, and science. It is developed and made available by the business intelligence company SAS out of North Carolina. This is billionaire Jim Goodnight's contribution to education in America. Highline already has an account with SAS. The problem with SAS is that it is free so even though we have it no one is promoting it. There is professional development from SAS if we ever implemented it. I keep bringing it up but so far SAS is not used by any of our teachers, most, maybe all, teachers do not even know it is there for use if they want it.

We could also build curriculum out of free resources, recorded teacher lectures and bits and pieces of cheap for-profit online curriculum, or I should say it is on my wish list of 21st century skills we need in our central curriculum administrators. This is something that some school district could do and sell to other school districts, I think. Highline makes and sells science kits to other school districts, why not a DVD with everything integrated.

If we want history resources, here are some
http://www.bighistoryproject.com/
http://edsitement.neh.gov/
http://sheg.stanford.edu/?q=node/45
http://www.historylink.org/Index.cfm?DisplayPage=education/Edu-Curriculum.cfm

I am looking forward to the day when all of these great resources, including the Library of Congress, are all integrated and handy for research and for fact checking as dictionaries were in traditional classrooms. I look forward to the day when a student asks a question the teacher will say, look it up on the internet. These resources are created by people with passion for the subject and the lessons are the kind we want for students. The Museum of Modern Art has great art K-12 art curriculum that could be integrated into a history curriculum too.

There is a lot out there. Someone just needs to put it together into modules covering K - college using Moodle or Camtasia. Then our teachers could also flip their classrooms and then courses could be truly mastery based and differentiated and students could move through the modules up through college at their own pace. Stanford does this with their EPGY math program that is an online K-upper division under graduate math online program. I think we can do that with all subjects if we decide to do it.

Anyway, we do need to do better. A friend wrote that the students he talks to do not even know what are in the books they use now, however out of date they are, which is another argument for changing how we teach our students.

Meeting With Representative Jay Inslee

2011-09-30T08:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I, along with about 14 other education advocates, went to a meeting with candidate for governor, Representative Jay Inslee to talk about education in Washington. There were 3 teachers and 1 librarian from the Highline School District, teachers and principals from Renton, Kent, Auburn, the PTSA president from Issaquah, and school board directors from Tukwila and University Place School Districts and an executive from the Washington Education Association.

The Highline teachers’ biggest issue for Inslee is the narrowing of the curriculum. The second grade teacher said that she has a teaching schedule that only permits her to teach literacy and math. She has no time allotted or curriculum to teach art, science or social studies or anything else. She brought a drawing by a talented student in her class whose talents are not being nurtured because the curriculum is so narrow. The Highline High School social studies teacher said that even her AP students do not have the basic background in history that they should have been taught in elementary and middle school to be prepared for her class.

Several other people brought us the issue that we are not nurturing our students’ talents and interests. A principal from Auburn said that he was a high school drop out and that things had not changed since he dropped out. The curriculum has only narrowed making school even more boring and disengaging.

This issue is not about money. It is about values. Do we value education? The problem with education is that we do not provide our students with a basic education. Highline certainly does not comply with the Basic Education Act.

California requires that every school have a School Accountability Report Card (SARC) that reports whether the school has enough textbooks in every core subject for each student, the condition of the school, and some information about the teachers at the school. Schools must report this information as a result of the settlement of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU. It is called the Williams Settlement. We need a law in WA that requires something similar. Our schools do not have textbooks in every core subject. An elementary teacher in Highline told me that Highline has not bought an elementary social studies curriculum since 1985. The only textbook is for the WA history lesson in 5th grade.

Our students do not suffer from too little money; they suffer from a narrow view of education and from a lack of K12 curriculum in core subjects.

Susan Goding

The Role of Leaders in 21st Century Education

2011-09-29T19:26:00.000-07:00

Ken Kay who was president of Partnership for 21st Century Learning is moving on on order to start a new organization to develop education leaders, called EdLeader21. EdLeader21 is a Professional Learning Community "dedicated to helping district leaders enhance the 4Cs (Critical thinking, Communication, Collaboration, and Creativity)in schools.

These are the 7 Steps For Education Leaders

&amp;lt;br /&amp;gt; &amp;lt;p&amp;gt;Your browser does not support iframes.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;

EdLeader21 and Pearson partnered to produce this video. They write in Edutopia:

Reflections
In addition to the video, please reflect on the following two questions:
Does your school or district have a specific vision of 21st century education and an implementation strategy to make it actionable?Are the education leaders of your school or district truly committed to implementing their 21st century education initiative?

Math Wars

2011-09-28T16:03:00.000-07:00

The math wars are over and both inquiry and tradition math advocates have lost. It turns out that students learn math best by doing math on a computer, not by listening to teachers talk about either kind of math. This method of teaching is called blended learning. Teacher lectures are out. Students watch video lectures, do their homework in class, and take tests on the computer. Teachers and classroom volunteers provide help when students ask or when the computer program alerts that a student is struggling.

Michael Young, President of the University of Washington said recently on KUOW's Weekday, that “40% of the kids passing a gateway course in the basic math classes, take it two or three times, but if you look at some of this blended technology, they are doing it in seven weeks, as opposed to fourteen weeks, they are passing at 85% to 90% rates, rather than 30 and 40% rates…kids are learning more, retaining more, (and) retaining that longer.” He also said, "There is almost a moral obligation to look in that area …”

Highline School District, a district just south of Seattle, had a 10th grade standardized test pass rate in math in 1999 of 28.2% and is essentially unchanged in 2010 to 31.6%. Seattle Public School District’s pass rate before the adoption of the controversial Discovering math textbooks in 2005 was 40.8%, in 2010 it was 44.3%. Dr. Young is talking about college students, but those are our 10th grade students in just a few years

Elementary students have also had great success with blended learning. Moreland School District’s Anderson Elementary was the lowest performing school in San Jose, CA. When Anderson’s teachers began blending learning in their classrooms the scores improved dramatically. Other schools in the district duplicated the practices. All student scores improved and their high performing school, County Lane Elementary, scores rose from high to even higher. For these results the Moreland School District won the National School Board Association’s Magna Award in 2011 for closing the achievement gap. The two extremes, the highest and the lowest performing students, benefited the most from blended learning because teachers in traditional classes teach to the middle. Moreland made the change within their budget; they did not need grants to implement the change.

In blended learning, lessons can be modularized so that students finish one concept, take the quiz and then begin the next module. A student who can finish the course in 6 weeks can go to the next course instead of sitting in class a whole year before going to the next course. A student who needs one year and six weeks takes one year and six weeks instead repeating the entire course twice as a student would in either an inquiry or traditional math class.

Highline School District just started a supplemental online math program in their elementary schools. I observed a kindergarten class learn to log on and do math for their first computer based lesson. Every student was absorbed the entire time. Students crave to learn on a computer.

In Highline, as in Seattle and most school districts, math is unblended because, as one administrator said, it is a bridge too far to give up lectures for computer taught math at this time. Technology has improved every other aspect of our lives and jobs except in the classroom. We have a moral obligation to teach our students math successfully. Schools that blend computer learning with on-demand tutoring are changing the outcome dramatically for students. We cannot stay stuck debating inquiry vs. traditional math instruction models when there is a better way. Success in math for our students is just over that bridge, where technology and human teachers do what each can do best.

It Is Banned Book Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read

2011-09-25T09:07:00.000-07:00

Banned Books Week is the last week in every September. Schools and school libraries are the institutions where books are banned or challenged most often every year, usually by a parent. The reasons parents object, according to the American Library Association, are the books are sexually explicit, are violent, have offensive language, or are unsuited for the age group. Most of us have probably read a few of these books, it is a little shocking to see them on the banned and challenged list. Most Roald Dahl and Judy Blume books have been challenged or banned. All of the Harry Potter books are on the banned and challenged list. Also many classic books that we would hope all students read.

Report About Day One of JiJi Math at Midway Elementary

2011-09-03T10:31:00.001-07:00

Angus Mairs, from Teaching & Learning sent me this email yesterday:
________________________________________________________________________________
Folks,

Day 2 of school, Day 1 of blended tech in math! Kudos to Rebekah, Rachel and Mark for the leadership work it took to have a full-on blended tech session on ST Math with 2nd and 3rd graders at Midway already today. I attended an hour-long session of the very first steps for the 3rd grade class. My goal was to watch and learn about all the bumps and foibles for these first moments so that I could be a useful executive leader and supporter as our pipeline to start up all the schools plays out in the next few weeks.

What happened was a far cry from bumps and foibles! The setup was perfect and the students flew through the login process and what-not. What happened next was amazing to see. The ST Math introduction sessions are brilliant, walking kids through all the things they need to be able to get engaged in the program in about 10 minutes, then getting straight to the math. The students were universally jazzed, engaged, little fist pumps over small successes, totally, totally engrossed in the challenges they encountered. Within the hour, students did the entire setup process, learned how to use the mechanics of the program, did maybe 30 or more math learning activities in a progression that focused on their learning needs in a couple of 3rd grade standards, worked through the famous ST Math 13-character visual passcode system (13!) and had their individual passcode memorized, and fell in love with JiJi.

I watched Rebekah do a mini-interview with an ELL student who she had been observing from 6-8 feet away. She had whispered to me that this kid had in the past felt so unable to access the math, but here he was completely absorbed. In her chat with him, he never stopped smiling and was heard to say “This makes me want to learn now.” In his next activity I then saw him totally struggle with initial place value activities at a 3rd grade level, then move through a demanding but progressively successful set of re-building activities to get him where he needs to be on what place value is about. Again, this is like 27 minutes into the very first session of all. We nearly wept. Well, Rebekah nearly did.

Students did not want to stop, even at the 1-hour mark, and demanded that they have this at home. The teacher Michelle Baca flew around the room with excitement, fascinated and anxious about the meaning of the JiJi activities the kids were encountering.

Many thanks to Rafael and Debbie, who have formed a good TL-IT partnership and have a specific game plan to make this happen at all the schools in the next several days. I highly recommend that you all schedule a chance to see this in action.

Angus
_________________________________________________________________________________

Create a Country to Call Your Own

2011-08-31T10:19:00.001-07:00

Created by Parliament's Education Service, MyUK is an informal digital learning activity designed to encourage young people to express their creativity while exploring the political context in which UK laws are made.

Blogging and other 2.0 Tools in the Classroom

2011-08-30T14:02:00.000-07:00

Teacher Allanah King talks about using blogging and other 2.0 tools in her New Zealand classroom. Allanah also post videos at the K12Online Conference website. She writes at the top of her blog, "Life is not a race to be first finished. This is an attempt to record some of my musing about learning and teaching."

"My beginning journey- this has had 29,000 views on TeacherTube but it's so hard to get there so thought it would be better here.(on youtube)"

The Flipped Classroom Infographic

2011-08-30T08:48:00.000-07:00

From Knewton

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

Flipped High School

2011-08-29T13:05:00.000-07:00

Brian Bennett, in his blog BrianBennett.org/blog posted some correspondence he had with Greg Green, the Principal of Clintondale High School about their experiences with the flipped classroom. Clintondale High School flips all of their classes. The website is called flippedhighschool.com/I recommend you go to his blog, but the jist is Clintondale started flipping the classroom for their at risk students. They realized that at risk students cannot get their home work done so they need to do that in class and that at risk students could watch a video of the lecture at home so flipping the experience makes sense for that population of student. What they found is that when they flipped the class the at risk students started out performing the regular students. That is when Clintondale decided to flip all the classes for all the students. When the principal at Clintondale High took a big risk by flipping his classrooms (as his test scores were dropping and disciplinary rates were on the rise) it paid off. In just one year, the failure rate at their 9th grade center reduced by 33% in English, 31% in Math, 22% in Science, and 19% in Social Studies -- plus the discipline rate dropped by 66%! Watch Greg Green and Clintondale High School's story firsthand and learn about how Camtasia products are helping bring the Clintondale's http://www.flippedhighschool.com to life. Connect with Greg on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/flippedschool

Pearson's Free Lessons for Remembering September 11th

2011-08-26T09:13:00.000-07:00

Pearson's Online Learning Exchange has created free online multimedia lessons for September 11th.

Time To Know Blended Learning Program Results

2011-08-26T06:53:00.000-07:00

The results of the Time To Know pilot program are in. Blended learning is increasingly demonstrating that it produces higher achievement.

"With Time To Know, Grand Prairie administrators and teachers reported improved student motivation, an increase in differentiated learning, and better critical thinking skills among the Time To Know students.

"'Time To Know is what this generation needs,' said Kathryn Wiggs, fourth grade math teacher at Whitt Elementary School. 'In my 25 years of teaching, I’ve never seen such discussions and interest. Kids are putting serious thought into the steps to solve problems.'

"Grand Prairie Independent School District is located 15 miles from Dallas and has 25 elementary schools. The district educates more than 26,000 students and serves a diverse population, with 63.1 percent Hispanic students, 17.6 percent black students, 15.1 percent white students, 3.7 percent Asian students, and 0.5 percent American Indian students." eSchool News

Washington Adopts the Common Core Standards

2011-08-23T17:10:00.001-07:00

State Superintendent Randy Dorn announces that he is formally adopting the Common Core State Standards for English language arts and mathematics, on July 20, 2011.

“I want to read to you one of the four goals: To think analytically, logically, and creatively, and to integrate different experiences and knowledge to form reasoned judgments and solve problems. These are the true skills for the 21st Century and we have to prepare students for the 21st century.” Randy Dorn

The Next Strategic Plan

2011-08-18T20:46:00.000-07:00

This is what I intend to say next time someone suggests we move on and start on the next strategic plan.

I was involved in writing the Strategic Plan in the summer of 2005. The plan was written in the Yormack Room at PSSC which was packed with round tables filled with people. There were 60 people or more participating, mostly teachers and principals.

In the room was Jill Wakefield, Chancellor of South Seattle Community College who knows what kind of education is necessary for students to be ready for college. Some of the other people in the room were Stacie Hawkins, now president of the HEA, representing all teachers, at that time Stacie was a teacher at Gregory Heights. There also were Barbara Daligcon, teacher, Cascade Middle School, Diana Garcia Principal at Cascade, Deborah Holcomb, Principal, Southern Heights Elementary, Phil Robinson Principal at that time at Sylvester Middle School, as well as members of the community, such as Pat Thompson Executive Director, YES Foundation of White Center, Eric Aasness President, Highline Schools Foundation for Excellence and Denny Eliason President, Highline Citizens for School.

These are the teachers and principals who work with our children and know our children and families and know what our children are capable of. They wrote into the strategic plan that they want K12 curriculum guides in math, science, social studies and literacy. They wrote that they want K-12 frameworks in math and science. They know the capability of our students first hand and they know what they need to teach our students. They want math, science, social studies and literacy curriculum and guides. The strategic plan was written by teachers and principals who work in the trenches, not based on some far out and far off image of our students.

I asked yesterday whether anyone from ERAC observes our students. The people named are not the decision makers. The people who are saying that our students cannot handle math, science, social studies and literacy and say that there is no point in making K-12 curriculum guides and frameworks do not know our students. They do not know our families. They are the ones who are far removed from our students and base their decisions on some far out and far off image of our students. I do not like what they think of our students. They are wrong about our children and they are wrong about us. They are wrong to refuse to implement the strategic plan.

The people who want curriculum guides and frameworks, the people who believe our students deserve a basic education that includes science and social studies are the people who know our children. The teachers and principals who will use the guides and frameworks wrote this action item into the strategic plan.

I believe the teachers and principals. I believe them when they say that it is appropriate that our students learn math, science, social studies and literacy. And, during the listening tour a couple of years ago, over and over, I heard from teachers that they also want to teach our students art, but they need more resources.

I want to finish this strategic plan. The people at ERAC want to move on. They define the problem as the strategic plan. I define the problem as ERAC. I will wait, if we cannot finish the strategic plan this year. I do not see any point in making another strategic plan if ERAC will not implement it. We need to finish this plan completely, then we can build on this when we think about the next long term plan we need to make for our children. I want teachers and principals to be central in the next plan also. They know our children and they know our families and they know what they need and they have the highest expectations for them. When we are done with this plan we can make the next plan.

The U.S Employment Skills Gap

2011-08-14T19:12:00.000-07:00

Boeing says they will need 3000-5000 new employees next few year and they are worried about finding qualified people to fill the jobs. They are saying, "We don't have a labor gap, we have a skills gap."

Arts Education Policy

2011-08-11T22:12:00.000-07:00

Highline adopted an Arts Education Policy last night.

Before we adopted it we discussed whether we should include a "D. Purchase a K-6 arts curriculum", after "Specifically, the superintendent or designee is directed to:"

I proposed the addition. Another board member argued that a curriculum will stifle creativity and that the district would need to purchase 7 textbooks to cover everything.

I, on the other hand, feel art is a skill. Students need to be taught about art and view art in order to develop an aesthetic sense of art. Students need to learn about color, hue, and line. There is vocabulary students need to learn to talk about art. Also, teachers have told us they spend hours after school developing curriculum. I asked, why don't we just buy the curriculum for the teachers?

The Board decided to wait and see how the policy plays out this year before discussing the subject again.

Example of a lesson from K12Online elementary curriculum
_____________________________________________________________________________

Highline Arts Education Policy 2160 Instruction

The Board recognizes that an arts education (defined as dance, music, theater, and visual arts) is an essential part of the learning experience for all Highline students.

The Board believes that through arts education, students learn to develop creativity, discipline, perception, perseverance, self-expression, and critical thinking. These capacities are fundamental in preparing students for college, career and citizenship. The Board further believes that a comprehensive arts education program promotes and strengthens our cultural diversity. Therefore:

A. The Board encourages development, implementation, and evaluation of standards-based, sequential, comprehensive, and culturally responsive K-12 arts education.

B. The Board supports the following elements, among others, in developing and implementing the arts education acrross all the schools:

a. Standards-based arts curriculum and assessment;
b. Qualified teachers in the arts;
c. Professional development for classroom and arts teachers consistent with Washington's Arts content standards;
d. Facilities, equipment, and materials appropriate to achieve educational standards
e. Opportunities to showcase student learning and student work;
f. Integration of and access to professional artists, cultural organizations and other community arts resources; and
g. Provision for ongoing review, program evaluation, and development of arts education across all schools.

C. The School Board recognizes the importance of equitable access to an arts education.

The Board expects class attention to these arts education ideals through goal-setting and planning by key staff. Specifically, the superintendent or designee is directed to:

A. Define one or more metrics to track progress in the arts at the school and system level, including reporting at the sub-group level where practical.
B. Prepare goals and strategies on annual bsis, and use specific data to report on the extent to which the goals are achieved,
C. Sustain an Arts Counci composed of student, parent, staff, and community representatives that will support development of plans and evaluate progress
__________________________________________________________________________________

Award winning art teacher Kaye Ogita talks about art education

Hybrid Foreign Language Class - Three Languages in One Class

2011-08-06T23:13:00.000-07:00

This video is made by the East Grand Rapids School District to explain their hybrid language course. In this course groups of students take different languages. Some students take Arabic, others take Chinese and others take Japanese. The students learn from a teacher two days a week and the other three days work independently doing the work assigned by their teacher.

Should We Cut High School to Two Years?

2011-08-06T10:20:00.000-07:00

This interview, the video is below, with Leon Botstein, President of Bard College, is from BigThink

Question: What lessons from your own life do you draw upon in overseeing Bard’s accelerated early education program?

Leon Botstein: Bard runs three early college programs. One is Simon’s Rock, which is a residential program in Great Barrington. The other are two public high schools here in New York. Where in New York you enter after the eighth grade so you do nine, ten, 11, 12. At the end of the 12th grade, you get a junior college, an AA degree. At Simon’s Rock you entered after the tenth grade and then you do in two years an AA degree. You can stay for a four-year Bard B.A. Because I went to college at 16, people think this is autobiographical. It isn’t.

I went to college at 16, that’s when I graduated high school. I wasn’t really prepared socially. I was thrown in at the University of Chicago, which was a terrific experience for me, with students who are largely older. There were a group of us who were 16. Chicago did specialize in taking younger applicants often, and, but it wasn’t because of my experience. It was my experience in the classroom, seeing young people come to college at 18 who had lost at least two years of their schooling and been turned off by bad schooling to learning. They had grown up, they were adolescent. They were fully mature. They were independent.

They were independent consumers. They had independent social lives. They were sexually active already late in high school. They had matured. They were treated by society as young adult, except in the school. In the school they were treated as big children. And the fact is that I thought it’s a good experiment to see whether a large portion of the college-bound population would be better off starting college early. So at Simon’s Rock we accumulated a lot of data that showed it actually works. And so in the public sector in New York we have public schools, not charter schools that do this. It has been fantastically successful.

In my view, for fully half of American high school students, schooling should end the end of the tenth grade. We should have a system that has six years of elementary and four years of high school. No middle school. No junior high school. And get young people out, let them start their education as adults at age 16.

Question: What are the unique challenges faced by students who enter college early?

Leon Botstein: Well, we have over 90 percent graduation rate and over 90 percent of them go on to further schooling. And they’re completely by class and race diverse. In New York our populations mirror the demography of the city of New York. What’s important is that they’re with their own age group when they start college. The older programs, 50, 40 years ago, put a 16-year-old into a college population whose average age was 19. And that’s a problem. Here they’re together as a group. When they go to four-year college, either for two or three years or four years, at the end of the 12th grade, when they have an AA degree, they actually enter as 18-year-olds with other 18-year-olds. They be advanced in their credits, but they’re with the same age group. So what we do is, we’ve created a system by which the young person is never out of touch with his or her own peer group.

Recorded on May 10, 2010
Interviewed by Jessica Liebman

How the American Federation of Teachers Union Diffused the Parent Trigger

2011-08-06T06:03:00.000-07:00

From the NY Daily News "A secret primer from the teachers union on how to thwart parents and stop charter schools"

"Posted briefly on an AFT website, the document celebrated the weakening of parent-trigger legislation in Connecticut. A blogger named RiShawn Biddle saved the post for all to read.

"A trigger law lets parents of kids in a persistently failing school vote to turn it into a charter school. Such a measure, on the books in California, threatens the jobs of unionized teachers.

"When the idea surfaced in Connecticut, the AFT swung into action by lobbying the legislature to bottle up the bill in committee. This was described as "Plan A: Kill Mode." It failed.

"Then the AFT went to "Plan B: Engage the Opposition," or, in honest terms, pretend to seek common ground by talking while making sure that "parent-trigger advocates ... were not at the table" in key meetings.

"Then, in a classic jiu jitsu move, the union helped to write legislation that would create "advisory groups" with parent representation, essentially claiming to embrace an idea it opposed.

"The AFT document bluntly admitted: Connecticut's parent committees are "advisory only and have no governing authority." The bill passed.

"The union learned lessons, according to the presentation: The "absence of charter school and parent groups from the table" during negotiations was very helpful. And "toxic dialogue from ... parent trigger advocates" was damaging."

Here is a video of the ATF presentation that they briefly posted:

Bat Yam Personal Education

2011-08-02T16:56:00.000-07:00

The English translation is a little rough but this is a very interesting experiment happening in the City of Bat Yam. The whole city supports students in achieving a goal that the student chooses. It can be any goal. Students sign a contract promising to work at becoming excellent in that skill. Citizens of Bat Yam provide students with mentoring or sports equipment or clothing, whatever they need to achieve that goal.

"Over the course of several months (students) discover their strengths, and in a structured process, they implement personal goals in several areas: in the personal area, with friends and family; in the scholastic area, at school; in the community area and in the personal excellence area, based on the talents and interests of each individual student.

"This contract is a result of a process in which the child is asked five questions:

1) Where did I come from? My family narrative….
2) Who am I today? Stemming from the belief that there’s something excellent in everyone, and things that aren’t as good
3) Where am I heading. Setting goals: scholastic, emotional, social… An excellence goal and a community goal.
4) How will I know when I get there? Criteria and indices for success.
5) And, the core of the whole thing: How do I get there? Who in the city do I harness to help me get there?

"You sign that contract. Your parents sign it. The “educationist” (teacher guide counselor) signs it. The school principal signs it. And the mayor signs it.

"This personal contract, which every student gets, is very impressive. It is also made in a very impressive ceremony. It gives the student a sense of commitment. That this must be done.

And it turns out that children don’t have any problem excelling in what they love. And it makes no difference. As far are we’re concerned, they’re all good. You can excel at soccer, at math, at the guitar, whatever you like. But you’ve got to excel.

"And then a fascinating process begins, where a teacher sits down with a child for the first time, and realizes for the first time that he surfs. She has no idea about surfing, but she shows interest. She says: “What does it mean to you? Where do you stand today as a surfer? Where do you want to go? And who do you need to help you get there?” And in this aspect, the city has turned into a school."

Bat Yam (170,000 citizens), a suburb of Tel Aviv, the entire social and economic fabric was revitalised through an intervention in the school system. A politician with guts (the Mayor), the dedication of teachers, educators and parents and of course the talents of children have produced this miracle. Yaakov Hecht and the international team of The Big Dance (Germany, Netherlands, Puerto Rico, USA, Brazil, Turkey, Korea and New Zealand) are rolling out this exciting new transformative education innovation.

The Global Search for Education.

2011-07-31T08:47:00.000-07:00

Childrens author, C. M. Rubin, interviewed the President of Bard College, Leon Botstein, on what a globally competitive education system would look like for Education News. In addition to being President of Bard College, Botstein is a principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra; a conductor laureate of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra; a founder and artistic director of the world renowned Bard Music Festival. Here is are a few questions from the interview.

"What kind of educational system will permit a country to have the human skills needed to compete globally?

"The educational skills that will enable a nation to compete in the economy of the 21st century include the capacity

(1) to reason using the language of argument, analysis, and interpretation,
(2) to observe and recall the visual and auditory experience of daily life and formulate it in unusual and perceptive ways,
(3) to understand the character and conduct of science, including computation,
(4) to perceive beauty independent of fashion and popular taste, and
(5) to construct and critique historical claims so as to fashion a notion of history.

"These skills can be developed in a nation’s population fairly and throughout all social classes only through a public system that permits competition and diversity. The expectations of all children in a nation should be the same, as should the opportunities. In an equitable, democratic system of education that reconciles excellence with equity, the outcomes will, however, not be uniform. But all will benefit from high expectations.

"What is the state of emotional well-being among U. S. students?

"One of the consequences frequently overlooked when we contemplate the failure of our education system is its effect on individuals whom the system has failed, which represents at least 50% of the population. Not only are their prospects for employment damaged, but they are also understandably and legitimately angry...

"Resentment and frustration find an outlet in a politics of intolerance marked by allegiance to irrational beliefs that threaten our constitutional foundations of freedom and dissent. The failure of the educational system will be most visible in the growth of this form of reactionary politics that is little more than an expression of fear about what the future holds.

"Does your definition of educational excellence take into account the quality of life of individuals and of a society, including its artistic and cultural achievements?

"The immense pressure in economic terms on all public services, including education, has led to the belief that the essentials in education do not include the arts. The arts have long been regarded as supplemental and discretionary to the rigorous study of mathematics, science, English, and history. It is ironic that in order to cultivate achievement and ambition in mathematics and science, for example, one has to find ways to develop a variety of skills and habits that correlate, with striking regularity, to the impact of serious education in the arts. This impact includes discipline, the capacity for sustained independent work, the cultivation of memory, the use of the imagination, and the ability to conceptualize and to take risks and intuitive leaps.

"Last but not least, the arts sharpen one’s powers of observation and perception. Far from being decorative, the arts are crucial to the development of the parallel cognitive abilities associated with doing science and becoming competitive in the workplace. This is the reason why so many of the nations with whom we compare poorly in the learning of mathematics and science — Japan, Korea, China, and Finland — all happen to have highly developed and effective programs of arts education that reach the entire population. The overwhelming preponderance of data regarding the correlation between learning and instruction in the arts concerns music — singing and playing instruments in a manner that requires familiarity with negotiating musical notation. But the same argument extends to the visual arts, especially in the age of the computer. The whole concept of design in terms of computer software, and in industrial design, for example, implies, properly so, an aesthetic component."

School 2.0 Redesigning Schools

2011-07-29T17:47:00.000-07:00

Prakash Nair has an article in Education Week, "The Classroom is Obsolete: It's Time For Something New".

Nair writes, "The debate over education reform has been going on for longer than anyone can remember...Lost in all this hand-wringing is the most visible symbol of a failed system: the classroom. Almost without exception, the reform efforts under way will preserve the classroom as our children’s primary place of learning deep into the 21st century. This is profoundly disturbing because staying with classroom-based schools could permanently sink our chances of rebuilding our economy and restoring our shrinking middle class to its glory days.

"The following is a fairly universal list of education design principles for tomorrow’s schools, though it would be tailored to the needs of particular communities: (1) personalized; (2) safe and secure; (3) inquiry-based; (4) student-directed; (5) collaborative; (6) interdisciplinary; (7) rigorous and hands-on; (8) embodying a culture of excellence and high expectations; (9) environmentally conscious; (10) offering strong connections to the local community and business; (11) globally networked; and (12) setting the stage for lifelong learning."

This is a video made by Fielding-Nair, Prakash Nair and Randall Fielding's design company. In the video they reveal that traditional school design is called cells and bells among designers. Students stay in their cell until the bell tells them to move to the next cell.

As much as 40% of a schools's footprint is hallways, which are mostly unused space except for a few minutes a couple of times a day. Nair removed the walls lining the halls and redesigned the spaces. Teachers have a space they call their home space, but they move around the school in their new roll as mentor, or guide by the side, instead of in the traditional setting in front of a contained class. Students move more easily to groups based on their ability and interest in the new design.

Teachers and parents talk about their childrens' reactions to the redesign.

"This video shows how old and dysfunctional school buildings can be brought back to life inexpensively to meet the needs of 21st Century learners."

District Leadership That Works

2011-07-28T15:43:00.000-07:00

Robert Marzano explains the meaning behind the subtitle of his book District Leadership That Works: Striking the Right Balance, coauthored with McREL CEO Tim Waters.

"One of the key findings in the book was that districts should do things system wide, in other words, districts should be able to say, in every classroom in this district we can tell you this, this happens, this happens, this happens. Now if you stop right there, a district could say, here’s what we’ll do, we’re going to get a program that is entirely scripted, and we know that every teacher is going be using this script when he or she interacts with students. Well, that is going way too far.

"What you want is a district that guarantees that certain things happen in a classroom, but also gives teachers a lot of flexibility and creativity in terms of what they are doing. We use a term in the book called defined autonomy. That schools and teachers within a district should have some autonomy but it is defined within certain parameters. Here are some things we all do, now around that you have got a lot of flexibility and creativity in terms of schools, and also in terms of individual teachers. So finding that balance between strong guidance from the top, but also flexibility at the classrooms and school level is the whole notion, striking the right balance.

"And I am sure that is more of an art than a science, it might be different from one district than another. But erring too far in either way is going to get you in trouble, too much autonomy and too much central control, neither one of those work…. If you look at the research the district has a measurable effect on student achievement if it does certain things."

What is the Knowing-Doing Gap?

2011-07-28T15:23:00.000-07:00

Found this on the Washington Association of School Administrators' website. I think this is very interesting. It is asking for Superintendents to participate in a study that deals with the “One inescapable conclusion from school reform research, however, is that evidence alone is not enough. We must confront the knowing-doing gap”

‘Critical Questions’ Series
February, 2011
What is the Knowing-Doing Gap?

Leadership is a conflict process. The central conflict in education is that not all students are learning at levels that they could be. From a systems and organizational perspective, it is a great mystery as to why our knowledge of what needs to be done frequently fails to result in action or behavior consistent with that knowledge (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2000). Current research is now capable of explaining specific actions, practices and behaviors of superintendents that produce high levels of student achievement (Marzano & Waters, 2009). Despite the fact that we can access quality information about how to lead and shape our organizations, many leaders fail to implement the desired change. Why this happens is in constant flux. It could stem directly from a basic lack of awareness of change, of how to engage staff, the purpose and rationale for change, or the aptitude to productively employ others in change initiatives (Armenakis & Harris, 2002; Horsley & Kaser, 1999). Other barriers to acting on knowledge are external to the superintendent. These forces may lay with the school board, the union, or state and federal requirements that present unique challenges of their own. Sometimes the problems they face are results of past actions taken to solve them. Facing these issues is not only difficult, but can be discouraging when other solutions were inadequate to solve the problem. Doug Reeves (2006) states that, despite these advancements in research, we are still at an impasse. “One inescapable conclusion from school reform research, however, is that evidence alone is not enough. We must confront the knowing-doing gap” (Reeves, 2006, p. 90).

The knowing-doing gap exists because we hold ourselves hostage with our own thinking, and also by the influences in our organizations which craft our thinking. Change is predicated on a leader’s ability to influence and craft the behaviors and structure which exist within the organization. This means that we must systemically confront the brutal facts of traditionally structured schools, address the assumptions and status quo of the existing culture, establish new conceptual frameworks, and identify new roles for improving the manner in which we collaborate as professionals and educate students. Identifying these barriers will provide the insight necessary to act on good knowledge. By seeing the whole picture, we can engage new possibilities that have untapped potential for change. With insight into the challenges of administration and educational policy, we should be able to bridge the gap between what we know are sound educational practices and our ability to effectively implement these practices for the benefit of kids.

If the education of children is a paramount commitment in our society, it then becomes a moral imperative incumbent upon superintendents to ensure systemic access and equity for all students. The question is whether or not we are acting on this premise. Understanding the knowing-doing framework allows a reflective and open minded individual the opportunity to leverage action for maximum benefit. It allows us to answer the question of what it would look like if we really meant it.

The central question of understanding how to close the knowing-doing gap is currently a doctoral dissertation at Seattle University. If you are interested in contributing to this research either as a superintendent in the state of Washington or an educational administrator interested in being a part of the pilot study for reliability and validity, contact:

Geoffrey Canada on Data

2011-07-27T21:28:00.000-07:00

“If you’re an education reformer you think, I’m going to help those kids and at least parents will be neutral. You don’t think they are actually going to get up in arms against you. What they get attached to is that building and the people in that building. And it’s only when we get our parents attached to data. That they understand the data that will get them to understand the decisions we will have to make as innovators when it comes to closing schools and getting rid of lousy teachers.” Geoffrey Canada

Your browser does not support iframes.

Time to Pay School Board Members?

2011-07-27T14:59:00.000-07:00

Lynne Varner wrote an editorial in todays Seattle Times advocating for salaries for school board directors. She points to Los Angeles which pays school board directors $46,000/year if they give up their day job. Rueven Carlyle, a State Legislator from Seattle introduced a bill last year to pay board directors $25,000/year. Right now directors get a per diem of $50/day up to $4,800/year. We recently had a discussion on the Washington State School Directors Association listserv about this and the vast majority who responded did not file for the per diem. I do file, I think I got around $2500 last year.

While I appreciate that Lynne Varner or Reuven Carlyle want to put their money where their values are, had they polled school board directors about this I think the majority would be against the idea. For one thing, $25,000/year or even $46,000/year is not enough to quit our day job, so board directors will not have more time to put into the school board job.

Some states require school board directors get training every year, Washington does not. We do have a self-funded organization that provides training but we are not required to take the training.

School districts would get better directors if voters focused on the candidates answers. School directors first job is to increase student achievement. The first goal of a school director is to get more education for more students for the same or less money. If a candidate says they are interested in anything else, then don't vote for them.

A bigger paycheck for school board directors is not the answer. Rueven, if you want to pass laws that will help student achievement, I have a few. Amend RCW 28A.150.260, put all public employees in the same health care pool, instead of the 200 the state has now; change seniority laws to end last in, first out; and stop passing unfunded mandates and get rid of the ones already on the books. Thank you for the thought though, and the good work you do.

What Superintendents Want

2011-07-27T09:27:00.000-07:00

The Thomas B Fordham Institute has issued a report, Yearning to Break Free: Ohio Superintendents Speak Out. that surveyed superintendents in Ohio to ask them what are the most critical issues face education including budgets, school effectiveness and troubling laws.

&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Your browser does not support iframes.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;

Here is what they said:

Lack of money is not the bigger problem facing education, superintendents say; it’s how and on what the money is spent.

Strengthening managerial authority over staff would be decisive to delivering gains in student achievement in their districts, even more decisive than increased funding, according to district superintendents.

School boards are “often reluctant to stand firm during collective bargaining because they want to avoid political battles and discord”: 89 percent of suburban, 71 percent of urban, 73 percent of rural superintendents.

Fully eight in ten (81 percent) say “I may dislike mandates, but some of the problems facing Ohio’s school districts require state legislation.”

State laws governing staffing and pay are a big part of the problem and need to change. Fully 93 percent view state law that “permits district labor negotiations over a variety of workforce issues that really should be off the table” as a serious obstacle to improving public education.

Almost nine in ten (89 percent) say the same about state law “requiring that teacher pay be based upon longevity and university credits instead of demonstrated skill and performance.” 82 percent point to making it easier to terminate unmotivated or incompetent teachers – even if they are tenured. Just five percent believe “that going through the licensure process in Ohio guarantees that a teacher is well prepared to succeed in the classroom.”

District superintendents support
- Combining state revenue streams while giving districts more flexibility over how the money is spent – 82 percent
- Creating a state-mandated health insurance plan that would serve all of Ohio’s K-12 system – 74 percent (We tried to get this done last year, this would help WA also)- Relying a lot more on technological innovations such as online instruction – 54 percent
- Outsourcing or merging back-office operations such as accounting and payroll – 44 percent
- Merging school districts – 31 percent
- Giving districts a lot more freedom to convert traditional schools to charter or community schools – 23 percent

Lincoln Center Institute Developing Skills of Imagination, Creativity, and Innovation

2011-07-25T19:57:00.000-07:00

This week, the Lincoln Center Institute in New York is holding what it bills as the "first national conference focused on making imagination an integral part of American education." Jeffrey Brown talks to its director, Scott Noppe-Brandon.

SCOTT NOPPE-BRANDON: "First, imagination for us is the capacity or ability to think of things as if they could be otherwise, to ask the 'what if' question. Creativity, by the way, for us is imagination enacted, using the formal language of a discipline to enact that imagination. And we take it to innovation, which for us is a new outcome pushing the forum in some way.

"So in that instance we're trying to look at how to help no matter what the students are learning and no matter what the teacher is teaching the delivery system or the education process for that. If you look at it from the perspective of how you can help people become more imaginative, you can build it into education. For us, that's through what we call the capacities for imaginative learning, which is a series of habits of mind or ways in which any discipline or any subject can be taught."

http://imaginationnow.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/capacities.pdf

Equity and Social Justice

2011-07-25T18:58:00.000-07:00

On the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences blog FedCan Paul Gorski gives 10 Commitments of a Multicultural Educator:

I commit to working at intersections.
I commit to understanding the “sociopolitical context” of schooling.
I commit to refusing the master’s paradigms
I commit to never reducing multiculturalism to cultural activities or celebrations.
I commit to never confusing multiculturalism with universal validation
I commit to resisting simple solutions to complex problems.
I commit to being informed.
I commit to working with and in service to disenfranchised communities.
I commit to rejecting deficit ideology.
I commit to putting justice ahead of peace.

"So when I consider the future of multicultural education, my fear is hastened less by resistance from naysayers than by misdirection by multiculturalists. My worst fear is that a vast majority of the initiatives, practices, and policies enacted in the name of diversity or multiculturalism appear, at closer look, to resemble, at best, cultural fluffery and, at worst, cultural imperialism.

"I’ve traveled around the world studying this phenomenon: a “multiculturalism” which has been whittled down so far that its equity and social justice roots no longer are evident in practice. Particularly in the colonized lands of the Americas, multiculturalism seems to be heavy, and getting heavier, on Taco Nights, intercultural dialogues, and multicultural festivals, and light, and getting lighter, on economic justice, racial equity, anti-sexism, and queer rights. And to whose benefit? Who or what are we protecting?

"Don’t get me wrong. Festivals and dialogues have their places in multicultural initiatives. But when efforts for racial harmony replace movements for racial justice; when we find ourselves learning about stereotyped class “cultures” rather than examining economic injustice (or at least inequities in access to quality schooling); when we come to believe that cross-group dialogue is transformative in and of itself rather than what prepares us to be transformative: this is when we, as multiculturalists, turn our backs on inequity and injustice and do the bidding of the powerful in the name of 'multiculturalism.'"

This is a recording of a PPT presentation by Paul Gorski to the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Celebrating Diversity is Not Enough: Finding Authentic Pathways to Equity

Paul C. Gorski is an assistant professor in Integrative Studies at George Mason University in Washington, DC, and the founder of EdChange and Multicultural Pavilion.

Try A Sample JiJi Math Game

2011-07-25T07:47:00.000-07:00

Try JiJi. I had no idea how to start but when I got it wrong it was very clear what I needed to do next time. The games work on this page so click on a penguin to give a try.

Your browser does not support iframes.

Sample JiJi Math Games

Teaching Without Words - JiJi Math

2011-07-24T19:43:00.000-07:00

"In school, the dominant way of conveying ideas is through words. Words can be great barriers to learning. Matthew Petersen shows and explains how we can learn without words.

"Matthew Peterson, Ph.D., is Co-Founder, Senior Institute Scientist, and Chief Technical Officer of the MIND Research Institute. He is the creator of MIND's Math instructional software that teaches math to students using a unique non-language-based approach. Matthew was recently featured on Discovery Channel's "Profile Series." His focus is on developing math learning environments that initially convey sophisticated concepts visually, enabling students to gain a solid conceptual understanding of mathematics regardless of language proficiency. Matthew's cutting-edge teaching methods are currently benefiting over 300,000 students. He is the author of "MIND's Algebra Readiness" textbook, adopted in California in 2008, in addition to other technical and scientific publications."

Matthew Peterson - TEDxOrangeCoast

What Does A School Board Do?

2011-07-23T11:42:00.000-07:00

What does a school board do? What are the responsibilities of school board service and what does it take to be effective? This is a clip from a workshop held by the Washington State School Directors Association for candidates for school board.

"For all school boards the bottom line is student achievement."

Big History - A Class that Introduces Everything

2011-07-22T20:21:00.000-07:00

Another free online or inclass history class for high school students. The idea for this class is similar to University of Washington Professor Maynard Olson's idea for the Million Year Curriculum. Instead, in this class David Christian suggests a 13.7 Billion Year Curriculum.

"Everything has a history: each person, plant, animal and object, our planet, and the entire universe.

"Each history offers valuable insights. Together, they reveal even more. Big history weaves evidence and insights from many scientific and historical disciplines into a single, accessible origin story – one that explores who we are, how we got here, how we are connected to everything around us, and where we may be heading.

"The Big History Project is dedicated to fostering a greater love and capacity for learning among high school students. Started by Bill Gates and David Christian our goal is to get big history taught to as many students around the world as possible.

"Big history is an introduction to the big ideas and methods of science and history, and to the many different fields of research that continue to advance our understanding of the cosmos, ourselves, and our trajectory as a species. It does not fit neatly into either science or history. Instead, it bridges those boundaries to reveal a larger narrative and encourages students to synthesize and think critically about different types of knowledge.

"While it may seem audacious to tell the history of everything in a single course, the story unfolds in a logical progression of ideas and themes, making it both understandable and an ideal setting for student development. By covering so much subject matter, spanning so many disciplines, the course helps students develop critical thinking skills, synthesize information, and identify and create arguments based on different forms of evidence—skills students will use for the rest of their lives.

"Just as crucially, the course is designed to stoke students’ curiosity about the world around them, and to empower them with the context and tools to learn about anything that interests them."

"We invite high schools in the US and Australia to apply for the 2012-13 pilot phase of the Big History Project. This large pilot will include as many as 50 schools that commit to teaching Big History. Participating schools have the opportunity to pioneer the curriculum and will play key roles in evaluating and improving the course.

"We are seeking a diverse set of schools, strong veteran teachers, and supportive administrations. Schools should have the ability to incorporate Big History into the history/social science sequence as a substitute for a required class or as a featured inter-disciplinary elective.

"The application is available for download. We will begin reviewing applications September 1, 2011 and aim to notify applicants of our decision in December.

"Download the application: U.S. Australia "

Another Free Humanities Resource

2011-07-22T15:44:00.000-07:00

If only we had a education system that knew how to use the internet as a resource. Here is another great free resource waiting for school districts that adopt technology.

Your browser does not support iframes.

Graduation vs College Acceptance Requirements

2011-07-20T18:46:00.000-07:00

I just received this email:

Hi Susan,

I'm a Highline HS graduate and an alumna of Smith College, and I now work (with my colleague Becky) to recruit new students from this region for Smith. We've been working with Mr. H (a former Federal Way School Board Director) for several years via his Sunday college-prep seminars, and we regularly attend the Highline District's annual "Life After High School" Fair.

I recently noticed that Highline High School's "college" requirements, as provided to entering ninth graders, aren't adequate for admission to selective/out-of-state colleges (see below). Students and parents might have no way of knowing this until junior or even senior year, much too late to make adjustments. Mr. H mentioned that he implemented *three*-part guidance for middle-schoolers in Federal Way - high school graduation requirements, in-state public college requirements, and selective/out-of-state college requirements. As you see, HHS is only publishing (presumably) the first two of those. He suggested I should bring this to your attention.

What are your thoughts on this? Are there opportunities for us to connect and try to get more complete information out to the District's middle school and early high school students?

Becky and I have been researching barriers to college entry, and I have some great articles about the importance of making complete and accurate information about college choice and financial aid available to students (especially disadvantaged students) in middle school. I would be happy to share some of the studies we've found.

Thanks for your time!

cmh

My original message:

I will have an exchange student at Highline High School next year, so as a new "parent", I was browsing registration information when I came upon this:

College Requirements (according to Highline)
4.0 Language Arts (3.0 must be composition & literature)
3.0 Social Studies
3.0 Mathematics (Must include Algebra 1, Geometry & Algebra 2)
2.0 World Language (Must be in the same language and 3.0 are recommended)
2.0 Science (One of which must be Biology, Chemistry or Physics)
1.0 Fine Art

On the other hand, when I consult the website of a well-known highly-selective actual college, I find this:
"There is no typical applicant to Smith and no typical academic program, but it is strongly recommended that a student prepare for Smith by taking the strongest courses offered by her high school. Where possible this should include:

4.0 English composition and literature,
3.0foreign language (or two years each of two languages),
3.0 mathematics,
3.0 lab science, and
2.0 history."

As you may notice, there are some serious mismatches here...

Museum of Modern Art's Modern Teacher program

2011-07-19T16:37:00.000-07:00

MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art) has free lesson guides and lessons for teaching art using images from their collection. This is another example of a wonderful educational resource that most school districts cannot use. No one is looking for curriculum on the web. There are few computers. Even if school districts have Moodle or Blackboard there is no central resource folder on the common drive for teachers across the district. Also there is so little interest in providing content. It is amazing how little interest and effort school districts and school boards have in building students' knowledge. MoMA is providing a treasure.

Your browser does not support iframes.

Remove Ineffective Teachers - Increase Achievement

2011-07-18T19:17:00.000-07:00

The Center for American Progress issued a report this year: Removing Chronically Ineffective Teachers, Barriers and Opportunities.

The report says, "It is well documented that teachers are rarely dismissed. National estimates from the 2007-08 Schools and Staffing Survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Education find that school districts dismiss on average only 2.1 percent of teachers each year for poor performance.

"There are a number of rough estimates of what this actually means for student achievement. For example, researchers from the Brookings Institution conducted an analysis of data from the Los Angeles public schools and projected that dismissing the bottom quartile of novice teachers in the district after their first year based on value-added estimates would result in a net increase in student test scores gains of 1.2 percentage points annually across the district.

"This gain would be significant over time. Researcher Eric Hanushek from Stanford University finds that removing the bottom 6 to 10 percent of teachers would lead to a gain in student achievement that is the equivalent of improving the performance of students in the United States to the level of Canada’s students (from 29th to 7th) on the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment in mathematics test over a 13-year period.

"(R)easons that teacher dismissal is rarely pursued—including weak teacher evaluation practices or systems, the time and cost of dismissal cases, the difficulty of winning cases, a school culture that is uncomfortable differentiating among teachers, and the difficulty of hiring replacements in some districts.

"In most districts today, tenure indicates the passage of time, rather than that some benchmark of performance has been met...Districts, in collaboration with teachers and their representatives, should work together to create streamlined processes or systems for removing chronically ineffective teachers."

Service-Learning as Curriculum

2011-07-17T09:57:00.000-07:00

The Cincinnati Public Schools have closed the achievement gap. They give several reasons:

1) Empower principals
2) Focus on a few goals
3) Expand service-learning.

I want Highline to give consideration to all of those reasons. However, I realized I wasn't sure what service-learning would look like. I thought is was something like internships, find some place for students to volunteer in the community or have students think up something to help the community that they can do after school and on the weekends. Require students to put in so many hours to get credit. Like community service mandated by courts.

It turns out service-learning is a class. There is curriculum involved. Knowing that opens up the kinds of issues students can work on.

The Highline School District encompasses 4 cities and an area of unincorporated King County. One of the cities, Burien, recently called for community members to join affinity groups to help create plans around various issues, called "affinity groups". These issues would be great entry points for students to think about what they want to do for their community. Here is a list of the Affinity Groups:

20-Something, Arts, Business, Education, Environment/Shoreline, Health & Wellness, Latino, Recreation, Seniors, and Transportation/Getting Around Town. There is a lot of meat here for students to make meaningful contributions to their community.

The Environment/Shorelines group has listed these as ideas that need addressing, which would be a great conversation starter list in a service-learning class:

• Citizen health & environment
• Marketing campaign to ourselves on progress!
• Attract big business! Economic development
• Education!
• Storm water infrastructure!
• Assure safety! (Crime)
• Less focus on additional low-income housing!
• Live within means!
• Celebrate diversity!

We want our students to feel a part of the community and see that education can change their life and their relationship with their community. Service-learning looks like a way for students to use their education while they are in school. This is a very exciting possibility.

Classroom Experiments in Entrepreneurship

2011-07-16T19:31:00.000-07:00

Thomas Friedman wrote an article the other day called, The Start-Up of You. The article is about how the job market has changed. But the title impressed me. Our students, especially students with some vocational education, leave school with marketable skills. Culinary students could open an internet business, or a open a food truck. Fashion students can offer tailoring. Carpentry students can become handy persons. Band students can become buskers or perform at wedding and Bar Mitzvahs.

What can we do to encourage entrepreneurship in our students? This video describes an experiment that is short, would not take a lot of class time and looks like a very powerful lesson in teamwork, critical thinking, and can provide students with a memorial experience in resourcefulness.

Hybrid Foreign Language Class

2011-07-16T13:19:00.000-07:00

From MLive.com (Michigan),

East Grand Rapids High School to extend hybrid language class
Published: Thursday, March 17, 2011, 10:52 AM
By Erin Albanese | The Grand Rapids Press

EAST GRAND RAPIDS -- East Grand Rapids High School students will have a second year to take a hybrid language course to learn Mandarin Chinese, Japanese or Arabic.
The school will extend the pilot course, offering a second tier to juniors taking it this year, and will continue the original class, said Jeanne Glowicki, assistant superintendent of instruction.

Currently, 24 juniors and seniors, eight per language, are learning through a combination of traditional teaching, distance learning and online programs.

Glowicki said it’s been a great model for offering three languages in one class, and students are on target or exceeding proficiency standards.

“If you were to see their language notebooks, you’d be amazed at the script,” she said.

Educational Backpacks for Checkout at the Library

2011-07-16T13:12:00.000-07:00

MLive.com (Michigan) reports about a library program funded by the East Grand Rapids School Foundation that allows children to check out bird watching backpacks.The packs contain binoculars, a local bird watching guidebook, and even a birdsong guide with a built-in recorder of bird sounds.

"Also included is an observation log of what participants found while using the kit. So far the lists include redwing blackbirds, wild turkeys, barn swallows, partridge, red-tailed hawks, white-breasted nutcrackers among others."

This idea has so much potential. Highline has not had much of a summer enrichment program since forever. This program could be expanded to included backpacks for stargazing, plant id, a check list for local museums, architecture styles, etc. Some our students recieve food backpacks, maybe we should pack some educational material along with the food. What an innovative idea.

We need to focus on teaching content not just on teaching skills

2011-07-16T07:50:00.000-07:00

Professor Daniel Willingham describes why content knowledge is essential to reading with comprehension, and why teaching reading strategies alone is not sufficient that students read with good comprehension.

Adding Economics to the Math Curriculum

2011-07-14T20:22:00.000-07:00

I visited a 5th grade class last year. Out of about 8 math questions students were working on, in a major textbook publisher's textbook, one was "If you take 80 whippets for a drive and 30 puke, what percent of whippets puke"? Another had to do with calculating the percent of cats with bad breath. I guess they were supposed to increase student interest. The textbook is a respected constructivist text that is supposed to teach students to become mathematical thinkers.

Whenever we ask students, they say that they want to be engaged by more rigor. They feel proud when they are challenged by their classwork. Students know they are being patronized by silly questions like these.

Highline has just adopted a new K-5 math curriculum. The last time we adopted a math textbook there was a faction in the community that wanted a traditional curriculum. After a year of looking over and using different texts the teachers compared notes and chose Discovering Geometry, an inquiry based curriculum. I posted videos of a Holt lesson and an inquiry lesson by a teacher who used Discovering. I am a big supporter of inquiry based, constructivist education so I voted to approve the Discovering Geometry textbook.

This time, I supported the choice of a traditional K-5 math textbook, Math in Focus, The Singapore Approach. I still support constructivist teaching but I don't think questions about vomiting whippets or bad breath in cats help students develop higher order thinking skills. My idea of an ideal math curriculum would be completely online with no lectures in a math learning lab. Students would learn to think mathematically while doing projects. However, we are not going to do that. Providing students with all of their math instruction online is too far for the majority in the district right now, so second best might be a traditional textbook and constructivist lessons from other sources. The Council for Economic Education has activities that teach math, financial literacy and content that students would never get if all of their lessons come from an elementary math textbook, traditional or inquiry based. The questions students would be engaged with are more interesting and content rich than the Nick at Nite questions they got from their previous textbook.

"Hands-on Activities That Strengthen Elementary Math Skills
"You'll tap into the natural creativity of your students with fun, hands-on activities that have your students making brownies (and choices!) and building kites, all with the end result of exploring elementary economics in fun ways and sharpening your students' math skills.
With Mathematics and Economics, Grades 3-5, you'll use 12 standards-based lessons that apply mathematical problem solving in the context of economics. Your students will connect with your elementary math lessons in fun ways you never thought possible."

Each year, the Council for Economic Education's programs reach more than 150,000 K-12 teachers and over 15 million students in the United States and in more than 30 other countries. Watch the video to learn more about how we're working to promote economic and financial literacy.

University of the People

2011-07-12T19:28:00.000-07:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a article about the University of the People, A College Education for All, Free and Online by Kevin Carey.

Carey describes the University of the People and makes the case for elite universities using their resources to offer access to their degree programs around the world in the same way that UofP does. He points out that " Undergraduates at the University of California at Berkeley can minor in global poverty, but Berkeley isn't using newly available online-learning tools to actually reduce global poverty by helping impoverished students earn college degrees...Righteousness is easy; generosity is hard."

"UoPeople students pay an application fee of between $10 and $50 and must have a high-school diploma and be proficient in English. There are also small fees for grading final exams. Otherwise, it's free.

"The university takes advantage of the growing body of free, open-access resources available online. Reshef made his fortune building for-profit higher-education businesses during the rise of the Internet, and he noticed a new culture of collaboration developing among young people who grew up in a wired world. So UoPeople relies heavily on peer-to-peer learning that takes place within a highly structured curriculum developed in part by volunteers. The university plans to award associate and bachelor's degrees, and it is now seeking American accreditation.

"Rather than deploy the most sophisticated and expensive technology, UoPeople keeps it simple—everything happens asynchronously, in text only. As long as students can connect their laptops or mobile devices to a telecommunications network, somewhere, they can study and learn."
Kevin Carey is policy director of Education Sector, an independent think tank in Washington.

Cincinnati Public Schools Close the Achievement Gap

2011-07-12T18:52:00.000-07:00

Powerful progress in Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) may help efforts to improve Minnesota Public Schools. Despite its problems, CPS grew from a four year, 51% high school graduation rate in 2000 to a four-year 79% graduation rate in 2007. It also ELIMINATED the graduation gap between white and African American students. Graduation rates for all students increased. Cincinnati is among the first major urban districts to eliminate this gap.

No one is satisfied with 79% graduation rate. (The rate has since increased). There are differences among Cincinnati and Minnesota urban districts (including higher funding in Minnesota, and a higher percentage here of limited English speaking students). But having represented the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Cincinnati for seven years. I’ve learned 11 lessons that may be useful.

1. Set a few explicit, ambitious goals: The Superintendent and Gates Foundation agreed that within 5 years, the district would aim for a 75% graduation rate and cut the racial gap in half. Both ambitious goals were exceeded.

2. Visit urban schools that closed or dramatically reduced achievement gaps. CPS parents, educators and students did this. Conversations changed from whether major progress was possible, to how it would be done.

3. Involve Union leadership. Cincinnati Federation of Teachers leadership helped develop, lead and encourage changes.

4. Create small schools at several large high school buildings, plus a few new small schools in separate facilities. CPS used research about the best small schools with no admissions tests.

5. Focus workshops for teachers in three areas: reading, math, and ways to work with urban youth. Respect and encourage faculty. Gates and other funds paid for workshops that teachers and principals helped select. Training was done in pleasant surroundings, often during the summer.

6.Reward progress: As schools made progress, their entire staff received additional money, and public recognition.

7.Empower schools to select faculty. Teams, including a building principal, faculty and sometimes parents, selected staff. Seniority did not guarantee a job.

8. Create focused partnerships. For example, Cincinnati Bell donated hundreds of hours of tutoring, along with free cell phones for students who excelled at perhaps the district’s most troubled high school as on 2000 (this and other factors produced huge gains). Xavier University provided free summer classrooms and other assistance to 9th graders at another school, helping convince students that they belonged in college. A community group, Families Forward, placed social workers at several schools to help strengthen families and serve students. Gates and KnowledgeWorks Foundations provided grants, advocacy and technical assistance.

9. Welcome competition from chartered public schools. This helped produce and inform improvements.

10. Give principals authority and hold them responsible for results. District officials encouraged effective principals and removed several who were not up to the task.

11. Expand service-learning to help students see classroom/community connections. This also helped convince students they could make a difference with others and themselves.

Although Cincinnati’s gains are encouraging, much work remains.

But Cincinnati shows that the right strategies, with open-minded, collaborative people, will produce major, measurable progress.

Joe Nathan, formerly a public school teacher and administrator

District School Directors' Responsibilities

2011-07-09T05:57:00.000-07:00

RCW 28A.150.230
Basic education act — District school directors' responsibilities.

(1) It is the intent and purpose of this section to guarantee that each common school district board of directors, whether or not acting through its respective administrative staff, be held accountable for the proper operation of their district to the local community and its electorate. In accordance with the provisions of Title 28A RCW, as now or hereafter amended, each common school district board of directors shall be vested with the final responsibility for the setting of policies ensuring quality in the content and extent of its educational program and that such program provide students with the opportunity to achieve those skills which are generally recognized as requisite to learning.

(2) In conformance with the provisions of Title 28A RCW, as now or hereafter amended, it shall be the responsibility of each common school district board of directors to adopt policies to:

(a) Establish performance criteria and an evaluation process for its superintendent, classified staff, certificated personnel, including administrative staff, and for all programs constituting a part of such district's curriculum. Each district shall report annually to the superintendent of public instruction the following for each employee group listed in this subsection (2)(a): (i) Evaluation criteria and rubrics; (ii) a description of each rating; and (iii) the number of staff in each rating;

(b) Determine the final assignment of staff, certificated or classified, according to board enumerated classroom and program needs and data, based upon a plan to ensure that the assignment policy: (i) Supports the learning needs of all the students in the district; and (ii) gives specific attention to high-need schools and classrooms;

(c) Provide information to the local community and its electorate describing the school district's policies concerning hiring, assigning, terminating, and evaluating staff, including the criteria for evaluating teachers and principals;

(d) Determine the amount of instructional hours necessary for any student to acquire a quality education in such district, in not less than an amount otherwise required in RCW 28A.150.220, or rules of the state board of education;

(e) Determine the allocation of staff time, whether certificated or classified;

(f) Establish final curriculum standards consistent with law and rules of the superintendent of public instruction, relevant to the particular needs of district students or the unusual characteristics of the district, and ensuring a quality education for each student in the district; and

(g) Evaluate teaching materials, including text books, teaching aids, handouts, or other printed material, in public hearing upon complaint by parents, guardians or custodians of students who consider dissemination of such material to students objectionable.

Maker Faire segment on The Martha Stewart Show

2011-07-07T14:31:00.000-07:00

"MAKE Magazine brings the do-it-yourself mindset to all the technology in your life." Makezine is an online happening with videos, a blog and step by step instructions that encourage people to use technology to make their life happier. They also have a youtube channel.

I saw this faire featured on the Martha Stewart show and hoped it was on youtube. Martha Stewart usually features recipes and craft projects. Here is the exerpt from that Martha Stewart show.

UW President Talks About Blended Learning

2011-07-07T13:55:00.000-07:00

KUOW, the local public radio station, interviewed Michael Young, in new University of Washington President today. The interview covered a lot of topics but the most interesting is what Michael Young has to say about blended learning. It starts around the 50 minute mark. Here is the transcript of his comments about blended learning:

Michael Young, President of the University of Washington

"What we have found about online instruction, while it is perfectly adequate for people who are place bound or time bound, and so forth, it doesn’t have near the efficiency or effectiveness of normal classroom instruction for outcomes.

"But what is really interesting is that there is a kernel in there somehow, that looking at this blended technology, classes, where it’s part online (and) there is some significant human interaction, they are beginning to experiment with this, Utah was part of this, Carnegie Mellon is doing a lot of this, looking at classes where there is some computer based, learn at your own pace, then some instructional component, then some T.A. component, and what we’re finding, is at least on the science side, math and science, the efficiency and effectiveness it adds is pretty extraordinary.

"We are seeing kids who, you may get 40% of the kids passing a gateway course in the basic math classes, take it two or three times, but if you look at some of this blended technology, they are doing it in seven weeks, as opposed to fourteen weeks, they are passing at 85% to 90% rates, rather than 30 and 40% rates. That has not only enormous efficiency, if you do that you really are increasing your output four times, but it also has dramatic effectiveness increases, kids are learning more, retaining more, (and) retaining that longer.

"There is almost a moral obligation to look in that area as much as a financial obligation. And so I think we will see technology play a role. I don’t think what we see in the simple broad based on line stuff is likely to be the wave of the future. But I do think there a ways in which technology will increase our efficiency as well as our effectiveness." Michael Young, UW

PBS-The Parent Show - Augmented Reality

2011-07-06T19:06:00.000-07:00

Augmented reality will change how students see the world.

Watch the full episode. See more The Parent Show.

Time To Know - New Digital Curriculum

2011-07-04T07:05:00.000-07:00

"Enter Time To Know’s Web-based software, which forms the basis for a suite of tools ranging from course planning and classroom management to group collaboration and student assessment. At the core is a collection of interactive curriculum in math and language arts (reading, writing and comprehension), as well as English as a second or foreign language. Thanks to its real-time nature, Time To Know gives teachers immediate feedback on which students in the classroom are succeeding or falling behind. “What we are building is a partnership between teachers and technology,” says Weiss.

Time To Know's digital platform currently covers grades four to six but Weiss says plans are in the works to expand it to grades three to nine.

Allowing students to learn at their own pace and according to their own proficiency makes the complex task of teaching students with differing needs easier for teachers, says Weiss. It will also help schools save money because classroom sizes can be bigger without negatively affecting students, he says. Weiss says that adding just one student per class will pay for the price of the software." From "New Approach To Classroom Teaching", Bloomberg Businessweek

"Time To Know has been running pilots in four schools in Texas and ten schools in Israel. The expectation for the 2010/2011 school year is for fifteen pilots in the US and around 50 in Israel.

The feedback collected from teachers is quite interesting: 86% reported an increase in instructional time. There was also a decrease in discipline and an increase in individual assistance during class time. Teachers also reported an increased sense of empowerment to guide and support the learning process.

Feedback collected from students showed that they perceived the new learning methodologies as fun and relevant. There was also an increase in motivation and positive attitude to subjects taught. Put differently, the kids started enjoying math(!)

The curriculum combines ‘blended learning’ materials, from movies, to on-screen tutorials, to on-paper exercises. Take for example, 4th grade math aligned to Texas state standards. There are 81 lesson segments, each 120 minutes long. The lesson segments provide a complete coverage and preparation for standardized testing. Lesson segments include:

Learning activities based on interactions with Rich Exploration Applets (more on these below). These activities include group, teacher-led, and individual work.
Instructional games that directly relate to the concepts taught in the segments.
Guided discussions to help teachers motivate and summarize lesson segment concepts.
Instructional video clips used to introduce, elaborate, or reinforce lesson segment concepts.
Review activities that help prepare students for benchmarks and standardize testing.

Teachers do have flexibility and can mix and match lesson plan modules and exercises. There’s also the ability to add external items such as videos from YouTube for example, or links to sites on the Web. Time To Know discovered from its pilots that American teachers stuck to the structured curriculum, while Israeli teachers took advantage of the flexibility at their disposal and enriched the curriculum with external materials."

From TechCrunch, "Israel's Time To Know Aims To Revolutionize The Classroom"

Grand Prairie ISD Video from Time To Know on Vimeo.

Student Impressions - Flipped Science Class- Mastery Educational Model

2011-07-03T12:55:00.000-07:00

When Jonathan Bergmann & Aaron Sams started the flipped/mastery model of education, they had no idea that it would strike a chord around the country. One question they are often asked is what do your students think about learning in this way. So they asked their students. In this video their students answer that question.

How To Start Course Redesign At Your School - MyWritingLab

2011-07-02T17:50:00.000-07:00

Brook Hughes, an English instructor at California State Bakersfield University, talks about their experience using MyWritingLab to redesign a one-unit class for students and the students' reaction to the redesign. The course is used across the curriculum in non-English subjects. Students can take the class as a stand-alone remedial or brush up course or embedded in Biology or History or other subjects.

Symphony of Science - We Are All Connected

2011-07-01T20:05:00.000-07:00

"'We Are All Connected' was made from sampling Carl Sagan's Cosmos, The History Channel's Universe series, Richard Feynman's 1983 interviews, Neil deGrasse Tyson's cosmic sermon, and Bill Nye's Eyes of Nye Series, plus added visuals from The Elegant Universe (NOVA), Stephen Hawking's Universe, Cosmos, the Powers of 10, and more. It is a tribute to great minds of science, intended to spread scientific knowledge and philosophy through the medium of music." by melodysheep

How to Open Math to All Students using Emporium Math

2011-07-01T18:45:00.000-07:00

John Squires, Math Chair at Chattanooga State Community College, TN talks about Redesigning math, with a capital R. Continuous enrollment is possible with emporium math. It creates a one room school house with math on demand. This is a clip from "Do the Math! The impact of course redesign on leaning and scheduling" workshop sponsored by Pearson.

Blended Learning: A Disruptive Innovation, Some Examples

2011-07-01T17:13:00.000-07:00

Knewton Blended Learning

Rigorous, Aligned Curriculum Key to Top High Schools

2011-06-29T19:12:00.000-07:00

All of Bellevue School District, WA's five high schools made Newsweeks's top 100 list of high schools. Here are the reasons two Bellevue parent activists give for their success.

To get on this list schools are evaluated based on: graduation rate (25%), college matriculation rate (25%), and AP tests taken per graduate (25%), plus average SAT/ACT scores (10%), average AP/IB scores (10%), and AP courses offered per graduate (5%).

_________________________________________________________________________

“We offer the full complement of AP classes…..so students can take things like AP Enviro Science or AP Psychology or AP Art History or AP Music Theory or AP Art (where they produce a portfolio). So students who wouldn’t typically take a “hard” class can access the AP curriculum. I think that makes a big difference.

"We also have a program that prepares heritage speakers of Spanish for AP Spanish.

"The curriculum starts early….students are prepared for this in their early years. Moving in just before 9th grade can be quite challenging for students.

"As noted, the curriculum that supports the more rigorous classes in high school starts early.

Audrey Bennett, a Bellevue Public School parent noted.
_________________________________________________________________________

"About ten years ago we moved science into the elementary schools on a concerted basis, with the help of the Bellevue Schools Foundation to be sure, but it would have been done later in any event. Reading was improved and math too, you get arguments, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. (Previous Superintendent)Mike Riley moved algebra and even pre-calc into the middle schools and worked to get the required math courses increased at the high school level. The biggest concern came from parents, just as with the AP push; the kids voted for them with their feet, or seats. The other factor that I think significantly helps is having a more seamless curriculum from 1st grade through 12th, with coordination between high and middle, middle and elementary, the principals and teachers actually talk with each other across the lines, and the curriculum is cohesive. Having the TIMMS review of the curriculum in science and math was a big factor in moving the dial.

"The challenge now is to reach all kids, at both ends of the spectrum and in between, which is what (new Superintendent) Amalia Cudeiro's emphasis on differentiated learning and bridging the achievement gap is designed to accomplish. The rigor is there for the most part, the goal is to make it work for all kids, because all kids can achieve at a high level. High expectations lead to high achievement.”

John Stokes, another long time Bellevue education activist.
________________________________________________________________________

High expectations, a curriculum audit that is acted upon, science in elementary school, a rigorous coordinated K-12 curriculum, which means curriculum guides, with the rigor starting elementary school. Parents have pushed back on the idea of increasing rigor everytime expectations have been increased, they have not demanded it. The school board has to provide the leadership. They persuaded parents to adopt the higher expectations of increased academic rigor. The school board believed that students can achieve when they are provided with a curriculum that challenges them to do more.

* Bellevue School District is one of the wealthiest school districts in WA state. I just heard Tom Vander Ark, who was on the committee that chose the top 100 high schools for Newsweek, point out that there are many wealthy school districts that are not doing nearly as well as Bellevue is.