Education

Dating can be a pain, and the steps we are "supposed" to take don't help. We all hope that the person we're dating is in it to win it, and we all hope to take certain "steps" to get there!

A new report by the prestigious Institute of Medicine says that the U.S. Education Department should designate physical education as a core subject, just like math and English, to help confront a “pandemic” of physical inactivity that has contributed to … Continue reading →

Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton just vetoed a line item inserted into the state’s higher education legislation that would have given $1.5 million to Teach For America over two years. This is what he said in an explanatory letter to the … Continue reading →

What Now wrote last summer about her experiences attending a Bard College 'Institute for Writing and Thinking week-long course (e.g. see here), and I was intrigued. I teach and research in a STEM discipline, but down at the muddy, complicated end where a lot of undergraduate work is in the form of essays, projects and other sorts of writing rather than problem sheets and cleanly structured laboratory reports, so the ability to communicate well through writing makes a big difference to my students' success. The bigger problems of the world around us that my science can be linked to (the 'impact' we need to hang our grants off these days) are mostly about the complexity of interactions between the natural environment and society and economics, rather than about producing new drugs or better materials to make things with - like the beaches we study, our 'relevance' is liminal, dynamic, and complex. Writing effectively and writing in different styles matters, as does being able to think about complicated, nebulous, intrinsically chaotic ideas, ideas where there isn't a clear right or wrong, as well as about the scientific understandings where there often is indeed a correct answer (especially at undergrad level).Also, I like to write. No, make that I love to write, although I don't always remember that, and need to push harder to get writing back into my life more. I process best using pen and ink, both as external RAM and as a filter for the emotion-rich, essentially inarticulate feelings of the responses of my brain to the world - if I can find the words to articulate my feelings and lay them out on the page, I make discoveries about myself, about situations I'm in, and about science and the conversations we all try to have with the outer world. As a kid, I spent my pocket money on stationary as well as candy - a nice notebook and a new pen give me great pleasure and a heady sense of possibility even now.The basic pedagogical structure and the reasonings What Now laid out made sense to me, appealed to me at quite a deep level - they chimed with how I want some of my classrooms to be, even though my subject material is STEM. All of which is to say, I tried it out a little in one of my classes, thought that it worked well - I liked the difference in atmosphere in the class, and the way that everyone was seriously engaged with the material and having their say for at least some of the time - and yesterday I finally got around to processing the instant feedback sheets from that group (the formal evaluation instruments don't allow us to focus on particular issues or developmental concerns in our modules). I was pleased to find out that the students seem to have liked it too - in fact, there was not one negative comment, although one or two chose not to respond to that question at all,I've just ordered the book produced by the IWT, and I'm thinking about how I might extend this approach into another class which needs some reworking. Definitely a good addition to my classroom tool-kit - thanks WN!

In a time when technology is drastically changing the way that we work, learn, and play, it is essential that school leaders have a clear plan for driving digital change in their classrooms, districts and communities.  These two tips can help: Remember that tools don’t change learning spaces; Teachers do: While integrating technology into learning spaces will require investments in new digital tools and services, many school leaders forget that investing in tools alone is never enough.

I had the privilege of being on a webinar panel with Linda Darling Hammond, NEA President Dennis Van Roekel as they highlighted the recent report "For Each and Every Child: A Strategy for Education Equity and Excellence."   You can find more about the report and hear the webinar over in the Collaboratory.

High schoolers working for NASA. High School Students United with NASA to Create Hardware or HUNCH brought in 16 high school students to help design and build a disorientation chair for NASA. The Barony Chair helps pilots experience what it is like to be disoriented in outer-space. (Education Week) Whatever. This University of California, Santa Barbara student pranks his peers around campus by pretending to steal their phones, staring at them, and hugging strangers. (YouTube) I am not a “yes man.” A veteran teacher from Illinois resigns via video after finding out she was being transferred to another school.  (The News Tribe) Peer teaching. Some parents do not like the idea of students acting as teachers. This parent blogger does not believe that all students have the skills to teach their peers and would rather her child learn from an expert.  (Cost of College)

Anyone who saw my last post will know that I'll probably be checking in late and without much success to report this week! But 'not much' isn't the same as 'none' - at 17:40 this evening I was just shutting things down at the office and feeling grumpy about my unproductive week, then decided to write one bad paragraph on the paper that I was particularly aware of having neglected. That took about fifteen minutes, and being written at that time means it truly deserves to be called bad, but bad words are better than no words in a draft - they're progress! Elizabeth Anne Mitchell asked last week for advice on how to keep right side (urgent) things from stealing all the resources away from top left things - and I'd love to hear your tips too!I'll start: my tip is do SOMETHING, however teeny tiny, on the TLQ thing before you let the urgent thing have the rest of your day. Even a couple of minutes contact with it, a new line of data entered or few words translated or reference formatted or downloaded, keeps it alive in your mind... Now I just have to learn to take my own advice...Roll call: Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Amanda: (1) Read 4 papers this week, (2) Put corkboard up on the wall in my office (I’ve had this on my to do list for a long time now) (3) Plan schedule daily (4) Spend 15 mins a day tidying up in the evenings. Contingent Cassandra: spend at least 50% of time on restful/rejuvenating activities (basically, recreational reading on paper, walking, or gardening). Spend rest of time on loose-end-tying, planning, and working on the beginnings of some household/financial tasks. Daisy: More revision, have to get into the figures and tables part of it and make that go away Elizabeth Anne Mitchell: List what needs to be done on each project, and put them in order of best/quickest returns. JaneB: a) continue to collect data for the interim report. b) Look at the last report and outline this one. c) rough draft the intro and discussion of DCP 2 (without restructuring it) - that's 15 paragraphs. d) a minimum of 30 minutes on at least three days tidying and rearranging upstairs Jodi A Campbell: get through 4 ILL books and write 2500 words luolin88: next report in week 5 Matilda: make a practical weekly plan, record my activity, not too much into details. metheist: go through 2 ILL books that are due soon; outline chapter 4; write 1500 good words. Cook 3 days; go to the gym 2 days. Propter Doc: 2 blog posts, plan data analysis for project A. think about project B. Plan the summer a little more theorydave: try to sort out the glaring inconsistences in paper one (part way through writing it I found a whole tranche of papers that made some of the introduction wrong and analysis incomplete). Sort out outstanding figure and references. Meet with paper two coauthor.

U.S. Rep. Martha Roby, a Republican from Alabama, has introduced a bill that would prohibit the U.S. Department of Education and the education secretary from using federal grant money or waivers to encourage states to adopt common standards or tests. This standalone bill—which is similar to language contained in the 2012 House version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—comes as some states are embroiled in heated debates over their participation in the Common Core State Standards. Roby's home state of Alabama, for instance, has recently withdrawn from one of the common-testing consortia, and its state lawmakers debated—but ultimately decided against—a bill to also withdraw from the common core. "The Executive Branch has exceeded its appropriate reach where state education policy is concerned, and it's time to rein it in," Roby, a member of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, said in a press release. Last month, U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, urged Sen. Tom Harkin, a Democrat who also hails from the Hawkeye State, to include language in the bill that funds the Education Department prohibiting the education secretary from using any of the money in the measure to oversee state implementation of the standards, develop tests to go along with the standards, or give a leg up in any federal competition to states that adopt the standards. (Harkin's response was that common core is still a state-led effort.) Roby's bill wouldn't prohibit federal officials from endorsing a particular set of standards, nor does it take a stance on the common core specifically. It bars any indirect or direct federal mandate that involves a state or school's "instruction content, academic standards and assessments, curricula, or program of instruction..." According to Roby's office, the bill has the support of Rep. Todd Rokita, R-Ind., the chairman of the House education committee's subcommittee on K-12 policy. "Rep. Roby believes filing this standalone bill and working the issue ahead of ESEA reauthorization will raise awareness of the problem and, ultimately, increase the likelihood of it becoming law one way or the other," said her spokesman, Todd Stacy. - Michele McNeil

We live in a time when our former Secretary of State, in a speech I find utterly mind-boggling, declares our public schools a threat to national security. I'm spending this holiday weekend thinking about the real-life influence-as opposed to cheap politicization-- of public schooling and schoolteachers on children's safety, well-being and patriotism. On Monday morning, I will join the Northport Community Band in a concert at the Northport, Michigan Village Cemetery. And Sunday, in church, I'll share the story of my uncle, Donald Tjapkes, killed at 19 in the first wave of Marines on Iwo Jima, in 1945. All weekend I'll be wishing for good weather, so marching bands and taps-playing trumpeters across the nation can commemorate the dead-- and inspire their communities. The piece below is an updated reprint. I'm not much of a flag waver, really. I always thought that author James Baldwin captured my feelings precisely in Notes of a Native Son when he wrote: I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I still believe, heart and soul, in the shining ideals of democracy, however --equality under the law, the American common school, a free, high-quality education for all children, simply because they deserve it. Thirty years of teaching school have given me a hard crust of cynicism about many things related to education and America. But I never lost my enthusiasm for the Memorial Day parade. For 25 years, my middle school band students marched through the small town where I taught and lived, in the Memorial Day Parade. There was a whole set of traditions around this event, which grew larger and more complicated every year: the aural passing down of our special drum cadences from the self-appointed 8th grade drumline leaders, mending the color guard flags originally purchased through a pizza sale back in '88, and patching up hand-me-down snares and sousaphones scrounged from the high school. There was never a budget for this--middle schools don't typically have marching bands--but somehow there were always T-shirts, and cold drinks at the end of the parade route. We had a stunning handmade banner that two moms whipped up with lots of lamé and sequins. In my last year, we marched 300 students, on a morning when the sky was a sapphire blue and Air Force jets flew overhead as we rounded the corner by the cemetery. This took up a fair amount of teaching time. I would get on my knees and beg colleagues for 20 minutes on the Friday before the parade, to assemble five bands into a single marching unit and take a few spins around the parking lot. One year, as I was trying to get the back of the band to master pinwheel corners, the front rank (rambunctious 8th grade trombones) marched right up the sidewalk, opened the front doors, and led the band, playing America the Beautiful at top volume, through the school hallways. By the time I sprinted up to the head of the band (and the principal popped, red-faced, out of his office), marching through the school was a done deal--and became yet another annual tradition. I was always clear with my students about the meaning and purpose of Memorial Day. They would occasionally whine about how boring America the Beautiful was--Mr. Holland's band played Louie, Louie, right? I explained that they were old enough to dedicate a morning to thanking local patriots and acknowledging the sacrifices made by Americans over centuries. Older people, watching them march by, would be pleased to hear traditional music. It was about respect. We do this, I told them, to remember and honor those who made it possible for you to live in this beautiful little town, in this safe world. People like my Uncle Don. Or Ray Shineldecker and Joey Hoeker, two high school classmates who lost their lives in Viet Nam. I had lots of funny stories to tell about Joey, who lived around the corner in my old neighbo