My Reader Feed

I met with a former professor recently and during the discussion we talked about sharing our reader feeds.  This is the write up on my reader feed that I shared with him. 

Personal Finance:
Get Rich Slowly - I believe this is the most popular personal finance blog.  It has a lot of good stuff although it was better when J.D. Roth, the founder was the only one writing.
 
Lazy Man and Money - personal finance topics plus some other things, I appreciate his writing style.

The Smart Passive Income Blog - I watched Pat take this site from just starting out to the $40,000 a MONTH site he has now, it has been cool to watch.  Excellent motivation for finding ways to make money passively.    

Education:
Spotlight on Digital Media - MacArthur foundation supported site that looks at digital media and learning

2,000 Hours - teacher trying to measure how many hours he spends on school stuff in a year not updated often

Video-a-day - short videos on topics that are taught in the classroom.  It usually has good stuff.  

2 cents worth - I think his name is David Warlick and he deals with all sorts of education and technology thoughts

http://deangroom.wordpress.com/ - this is the teacher using the game Minecraft as a teaching tool

Clive on Learning - A learning architect is what he calls himself, more focused on learning in the workplace

Eduflack - A school board member from NOVA area

The Quick and the Ed - blog from the Education Sector, they have a nicely daily round up called quick hits.

Joanne Jacobs - Writes quick summaries of major education stories.  Usually posts about 4 times a day and is about 24 hours behind the news cycle. 

The following are all from the Education Week website:
Bridging Differences - Debra Meier and Diane Ravitch write letters back and forth to each other
 
Digital Education- tech topics and trends in K-12

On Performance - I like this guy, but he is not writing very much currently
 
Rick Hess Straight Up - my counter to Bridging Differences.  I like his candor. 

Other:
Leading Smart - Christian Leadership

Seth's Blog - best read of my day by far 

Zen Habits - interesting ideas on simplifying life

The Blog of Author Tim Ferris - not sure why I subscribe to this one. 

Overflowing with MMMM - my wife's blog

Reflecting Hope - my blog

Smarter Tests Make for Smarter Schools

Our current standardized, high stakes tests do a disservice to our students.  They don't measure student growth and they penalize students who develop at a rate other than what society deems to be the norm.  We should get rid of those tests and replace them with a testing system that actually measures student progress from year to year rather than measuring if schools can meet basic minimum thresholds.

A testing system that measures progress  would help to better identify teachers and practices that have value.  It would also help students see how their learning builds from year to year.  It would provide relevant and meaningful feedback for teachers.  In short, it would provide better data from which students, teachers, administrators, parents, and the greater community could make better decisions.     

I like one particular option that creates a testing system similar to that of the GRE.  It would be computerized and would work to locate the level of the students knowledge by adjusting the difficulty of questions and concepts based on student responses.  To do this the test would need to take the skills necessary for success in a discipline and break them down into their component parts.  Those parts would then have to be categorized in terms of difficulty from the first testing year up until the last testing year.  For example, all the math concepts taught from say second grade through twelfth grade would be included.  Multiple question types would need to be created for each concept and then all of them would be compiled into the program.  Students would take the test from the same program every year.

Right now, the current tests don't measure student growth for smart students very accurately so we don't have a picture of how much they actually learned from their teacher.  Because each test given each year is different, you can not measure student growth from year to year with much accuracy.  By giving the same test, year after year, you start to get a picture of students learning growth.

I am looking forward to the day that education starts getting smarter about how it collects data.             

 

How Teacher Pay Scales Impact My Life

So I mentioned recently that teachers are paid based on years of experience and number of college credits earned.  I also mentioned that research has shown that these two categories have no correlation to student performance.  That means that a teacher with ten years of teaching experience and a bachelors degree could teach just as well or better than a teacher with 30 years of experience and a masters degree.

I am currently working with in this system to try and increase my pay.  I am taking the last class I need to hit the threshold for the next pay bump.  I do this because I see no other way to increase my earnings as a teacher.  I am not patient enough to wait for the yearly increases.   Particularly not early in my career where they are less frequent. 

That is another disappointment that I have with teacher pay.  My division's pay scale offers no raise for teachers in their 1, 2, or 3 years of teaching.  Yet research has shown that these are incredibly formative years for new teachers.  The first pay bump comes at the start of your fourth year, which here in Virginia, is when you earn your long term contract.

I am looking forward to the day when pay in education is a reflection of your worth as a teacher of students and not a reflection of your years in the profession and your level of formal education.  

Wealth is New

I am taking a class through the Foundation for Teaching Economics entitled "Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?"  One idea from the course for all of you to consider, poverty has been the norm throughout history while wealth has not.   

The idea of wealth being as widespread as it is today is rather new.  For a long, long time almost all of humanity lived in poverty.

Helps you appreciate what you do have.  

Teacher Pay Is Not Linked with Student Achievement

How irritated would you be to know that teachers are paid based on a standard that has no correlation to student performance as measured by standardized tests in math and reading?

What I mean  is that teachers are paid based on a combination of years of experience and educational level attained.  The more years you teach and the more college credits you earn, the more money you make.  Yet no connection has been made in research demonstrating that someone with a masters degree is definitely going to be a better teacher than someone with a bachelors degree.  Some research has shown that teachers do show some improvement in teaching performance between the first year and fifth year of teaching; however, research has been unable to demonstrate meaningful improvement after the fifth year in teacher quality.  Teachers are paid based on standards that have little to do with student performance.   

I mention all this because I saw that the Manhattan Institute for Policy research released a paper on a recent study supporting these findings.  The key measure that they used to demonstrate student achievement were standardized test scores.  A quick glance at the standardized tests used in Florida, the state covered by the study, finds that they only use multiple choice questions.  Multiple choice questions cannot effectively measure skills like creativity and the ability to create new material, both of which are considered higher order thinking skills. 

So that leads me to this question, are these research findings actually telling us years of teaching experience and college credits are worthless when it comes to predicting teacher performance or is it telling us that they are worthless when it comes to predicting student performance on imperfect multiple choice tests?              

As the amount of information grows, so does our need for eachother

We consume a lot of information in the course of our day.  More so now then at any other time in the history of man.  We need each other more than ever to help make sense of it.  

A recent theme that has come out of my small group is the idea that the Bible must be interpreted and understood as a group of believers and not as individuals.  I tend to agree with that sentiment because I gain a far deeper and nuanced understanding of stories and passages after hearing the perspective of others.  I think this same idea applies when exploring and trying to learn from the volumes of information that bombards us today. 

While watching West Wing the other night President Bartlet quoted Ephesians 5: 21, "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ." This presents the idea that we should be serving one another or putting the needs of others before our own.  Again, I think this is very important today because so much information is out there.  We need to find the areas of knowledge that we care about and are knowledgeable in and we need to share our insights in those areas with others who are willing to do the same.  As Seth Godin puts it, we need to find a tribe.     

Couple this with a comment posted by an acquaintance from William and Mary.  He was asking if their is evidence supporting the idea that education can enhance the ability of the human mind to process information.  I think the enhancement comes from learning together.  Yes you can learn on your own, but I don't think you do it as well as when you do it in a group. That to me is the true value of education in a public context.  We provide each other with experiences and ideas that we would not otherwise interact with.  By learning together we learn more.   

If we take the idea of approaching learning in groups, connect that with the idea of serving one another found in Ephesians, and then share that learning with each other publicly in our areas of expertise we make all of us better.  

That is why I appreciate it when friends share items on their Google reader feeds, post articles on Facebook, and blog about their experiences.  I plan to keep doing the same.  Will you join me?  

How Do We Measure Education? What are we measuring?

I want to know how you can effectively measure education? 

So lets start with a definition of education so we know what we want to measure. 

Merriam-Webster said, "the knowledge and development resulting from an educational process."

The Free Dictionary said, "An instructive or enlightening experience"

Wikipedia may have had what I think is the most thorough definition when it said, "Education in the general sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character, or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills, and values from one generation to another."

So when someone receives an education from the public K-12 system it is a series of formative effects covering a number of topics some of which are formal and some which are informal.  

So I ask the question again, how can we effectively measure education?  What is the mark of an educated individual?  

Hidden Subsidies Hold Back Teacher Compensation

I read a good blog post the other day from Justin Baeder, titled Subsidies to the Teaching Profession.  In the post he argued that " the teaching profession continues to be subsidized" by three things which are helping to keep wages lower. 

First, is what he called the charity work subsidy.  Because education is a noble profession, people are willing to "donate" their time to it.  He mentions seeing applicants for open teaching positions who have already had a successful career or who are supported by wealthy parents.  Speaking from my own experiences, I have seen former military folks in the classroom who would fit into this group as well.  I might even fall into this group a little bit as both my parents and my in-laws are very generous towards my family when it comes to things like vacations and eating out.  Their financial support in these little areas has helped make my family's quality of life better than it would be if we were just on my salary.   

Second, is the rich spouse subsidy.  He acknowledges that the term, which I adjusted slightly, might be a little offensive.  This is the idea that many teachers have spouses who work at better paying jobs.  Again I see this at play with my own colleagues.  Many are married to lawyers, doctors, and engineers who are paid well.  My own mother falls into this category.  My father makes a good living from his job which allows my mother to work as an amazing preschool teacher with out having to worry as much about what she gets paid.

Another part of this subsidy is summed up when Justin says, "For men in particular, the idea of choosing a career that needs to be financially supported by a partner's career isn't very appealing."  I admit I struggle with this idea in a slightly different context.  My wife is about to stay home full time to watch our six month old son.  Our budget is going to be tight because of this decision.  I wish that I could paid a little bit more so things wouldn't be so tight.

The final subsidy is what Justin calls the vow of poverty.  Justin sums this idea up best when he says, "Many educators reject higher-paying alternatives because they believe education to be a worthy endeavor."  I definitely fall into this category.  One of the many reasons I was drawn to education was the idea of giving back in a public capacity.  I knew what I was getting into from a compensation stand point and was still willing to take the job.  I gave up a career in Washington, D.C. to become a teacher.  

What do you think about these subsidies?  Do you think they make sense?  Do you agree with Justin that they are holding back teacher compensation?        

What Makes a Good Video Game: Fantasy

If good video games have educational value, which I argued that they do in Video Games Are Educational, than what makes a video game good?   Well the first part is that the game has some sort of fantasy. 

When I say fantasy I mean anything that allows the game player to pretend to be someone or something that they likely could not be.  For example, a city planner in the game Sim City, a football coach/player in the Madden Football games, a theme park operator in Roller coaster Tycoon, or a World War II soldier in one of the many first person shooters that exist today.  Having a good fantasy helps to captivate players and pull them into the game.  It helps them to become emotionally invested in the game and its outcomes.  This is particularly effective if you can tap into an interest of the gamer player. 

I think this is one area where video game makers are falling short when it comes to attracting more female game players.  I don't think they are doing enough to appeal to female fantasy situations.  If you look at recent games that have been very successful, they do a better job of drawing in female game players.

 What fantasy aspect of a game do you like?      

Video Games are Educational

Do you learn from video games?  That is the major premise of a course I am taking called, Games, Simulations, and Virtual Worlds for Learning.  So far I have been amazed and surprised at how much you actually can learn from a video game. 

First, you learn the basic controls.  You have to teach yourself what the various buttons, clicks, shakes, and pushes do in the game. 

Second, you learn the how to do things with in the game itself.  For example, you learn how to select a play in a football game or you learn how to zone for residential in Sim City.

Third, you start to put those actions together to solve problems.  The nice thing about games is that those problems are easy at first.  They scaffold you as you advance through the game into deeper and deeper levels of problem solving.

Fourth, you learn about the story of the game.  Some games have very complex stories, while others like Sim City are pretty open ended.

Fifth, you learn the values of the game that are defined by its story and its rules.  For example, in one of my readings for the course I came across a quote from a child who had played Sim City.  That child had made the connection in the game that raising taxes leads to riots.  While not directly true in the real world, that idea certainly conveys a value about taxes to the child.

This is just scratching the surface.  Stay tuned for more learning about video games.  I am really excited to explore how video games can help me be a better teacher.   

Weekly Roundup (4)

Going to get this little blog running again after a nice vacation.  Here are three links from the last few weeks that caught my eye. 

Moving Beyond Standardized Test Scores in Evaluating Special Education Teachers:  Part 1 - Patrick Ledesma tells the story of a special education teacher who had a 100 percent pass rate for her students. - This is the kind of real world  analysis that I am not seeing in the education debate about testing.  I don't mind using measures of performance as long as considerations are taken for vast array of additional inputs that go into a student's performance.  I really like his point at the end of the article where he asks how this teacher would do in a division that was less supportive.    

Social Media doesn't "cause" unprofessional or inappropriate behavior.  It "catches it. - Lisa Nielsen raises an argument against restricting teachers use of social media.  - I tend to agree with Lisa's distinction about banning bad behavior and not banning our communication mediums, but this is a tough issue for me right now.  I have not figured out which side I want to join.    

Federal Education Budget Project - New America Foundation has compiled relevant education data into an easy to search database.  I always like things that add to the transparency of government.  

The School Year has ended....for real this time.

Tomorrow is my last day of work for the 2010/2011 school year. For many teachers like me summer break is beginning and they can rest, recharge their batteries, and reflect on what happened over the past school year.  In my division we have nine weeks before we are back to start a new year.

Yesterday, I talked about the awkward time period at the end of the school year.  Today, I want to explore the issue of our school calendar at a broader level.  The approximately 180 days of schooling that takes place in most states is a product of a time when most people worked on farms.  Does it make sense to keep that same calendar into today's society? 

Let me propose an alternative.  What if public schools moved to fill more of the full year calendar, spreading the 9 weeks of summer vacation out over the course of the calendar year.   

First, it cuts down on the summer brain drain problem.  For some kids summer is a time where they forget what they learned.  When they get back in the fall, they have to relearn information to catch up.  From what I have read this problem tends to effect more students who are economically disadvantaged.  So spreading schooling out over more of the year would help to eliminate this problem in education.  

Second, I think it would help to balance the teacher workload.  Teachers put in a ton of time, effort, and energy over the course of the school year and really do need some time in the summer to recover.  I don't know if they actually need nine weeks for recovery.  By spreading out the school year and creating smaller chunks of vacation, like three three week breaks and two one week breaks, you could help teachers still get the rest they need while maintaining a fairly consistent school year.  

Third, it would require schools to rethink how they organize their classes.  You wouldn't want a class interrupted by a three week break so you would have to create smaller lengths of time for classes.  Instead of 180 or 90 days, you might have 60 days of class.  That would help to keep courses in more manageable chunks for teachers to plan and execute.  I also think it would help kids focus on content more, since material would need to be more evenly spaced.

What do you think about this idea?  I am not sure how I feel about it, but I figured I could propose something to get the conversation started.  Post a comment and tell me how you would like to design the school year.  

Schools out for the....WHAT you mean it really ended two weeks ago!

A friend shared an op-ed from one of the local papers that argues Virginia does a disservice to its students by requiring them to remain in school even after the Standard of Learning (SOL) tests are over in early June.  The op-ed says the testing must be completed by then because of Federal rules.  I don't know if that is true, but I do know that testing always takes place in late May.  Here in Virginia students are required to be in school for 180 days, but they cannot begin school before Labor Day in order to supposedly protect our tourism industry.  Thus this creates a situation where teachers have two to three weeks of time left to fill and the actual amount of time to prepare for the SOLs is around 170 days.  The easy solution to this is to adjust one of the two dates, either the Labor Day law or the SOL testing window.  So far neither of those has happened.  If my memory serves me correctly, a bill to remove the Labor Day barrier was defeated in our General Assembly. 

This issue creates an awkward period of time for teachers.  Students are bright enough to know that they aren't really responsible for what is being taught in the same way they are before the SOL tests.  Some teachers use this time to try and do creative lessons that don't fit with the SOLs.  Some try to get students to explore areas they are curious about.  Other teachers don't do much of anything, showing a lot of videos so they can catch up on grading.  To me it is wasted time.  We are not being efficient.  Why keep the students at this point?

So what should give?  The post Labor Day start time or the SOL testing window?  What do you think?     
  

Homework: Do you Love it or Hate it?

I saw this New York times article today on homework.  The article looks at the debate around homework as some school divisions look to ban or restrict homework.  The school system featured in the article will vote to put in place rules that limit homework to ten minutes times the grade level of the student.  So a third grade student would have thirty minutes of homework and a twelfth grade student would have two hours of homework a night.  I am not sure what K X 10 equals for a kindergarten student.

The question I have is this something that school boards should be making rules about?  Doesn't that seem a little extreme?  It would take away a teacher's ability to provide the right amount of additional practice for a student.  How do you judge what thirty minutes of homework is when students work at different rates and speeds?

I did like the idea of having certain nights be homework free.  I also liked the idea of having breaks be homework free, but I would like to know what my AP teaching friends feel about that idea.  The idea of goal work was interesting and I would love to see that get tied into something similar to what the Khan academy is doing with math.     

I know last year I was lucky to have 40 percent of my students turn in homework on a regular basis.  They didn't really care about it.  That might of had something to do with me being a first year teacher though.....

I was taught at Education School that you want students to have three points of contact with a certain topic or subject in a 24 to 36 hour period.  For me, that meant in class, at home with homework, and then as a review the next day in class.  I always saw homework as something where you could get a little more practice with the concept we learned in class.  Very rarely did I give extensive homework assignments to those eighth grade students.     

So where does that leave homework?  In or out?  Love it or hate?  Let me know by adding a comment.

History Sacrificed on Altar of Math and Reading

The National Association of Education Progress (NAEP) released the history testing information today.  As a history lover and teacher it made me sad.  For those not associated with the education world, NAEP provides some of the best data for analyzing school performance because of the way they go about testing.  Some highlights from the eighth grade results:

• Only 17 percent of eighth grade students scored at or above the proficient level
• 31 percent of eighth grade students scored below basic 
• Interestingly, males did slightly better at the extremes than females.  That is a greater percentage of females scored below basic and a greater percentage of males scored proficient or better.  The differences between the genders were only a few percentage points. 
• Not surprisingly, family income was a strong predictor of scores.  Fifty percent of free lunch students scored below basic while only 19 percent of those students not eligible for free lunch scored below basic.     
• I can not back this statement up from the NAEP data, but NBC News commented tonight that the reason for these disappointing numbers is that reading and math get ten times as much instructional time as history does.  

 Curious how you would do?  You can take some sample questions at all three tested grade levels.

What do you think about the results?  I appreciate that you took time to read my post.     
 

Are Schools a Business or Government?

Our society is stuck between wanting our schools to be businesses and wanting our schools to be government.  I am not sure we can have it both ways.

How do we change governments that we don't like in the United States?  We vote for someone else to run the government.  If enough people don't like the way the government is running then we get new government leaders.   

How do we change private business that we don't like in the United States?  We don't give them our business.    If enough people don't like the business then it goes out of business.

Right now our public schools follow the government model via school boards.  I feel like more people want them to be like the business model.  How do you make that happen though?  How do you make schools a business when the bottom line is not revenue and profits, but people and learning?

What are your thoughts on this subject? 

Weekly Roundup (3)

A quiet week on the blog here at Reflecting Hope, but never fear, a weekly round up to give you some educational reading enjoyment.  

PBS News Hour - Good School Bad School - A nine minute video that shows the many sides of an elementary school in New York and asks you to judge if they should stay open or be closed.  I am curious to hear what you think about this....  

Four Paths for the Future - Jal Mehta summarizes the different reform efforts into four broad camps.  This is a good piece if you are interested in understanding what kind of reforms people are talking about for education. 

The next two come from Joanne Jacobs blog.  She typically posts summaries of educational stories that include links to the original sources.  I like her stuff because they are usually short and easy to read. 

If not 100% Proficiency, then what? - Joanne Jacobs discusses more appropriate goals for education based on local circumstances.    

Cramming to the top - Joanne Jacobs summarizes an article on how the major Chinese exam makes Chinese students less creative.

Having your teacher cake and eating it too

I was in Sunday School just the other day when a discussion erupted about teachers.  A college student who is studying education mentioned how parents of some of her fellow students didn't feel like education was good enough for their child to be studying. 

I bet if we asked those same parents what kind of teacher they wanted for their child when their child was going through K-12 schooling they would have said a great one.

So why is it that parents want great teachers, but don't want their own "great" kids to go into teaching?  How will we as a society have enough great teachers, if the parents of smart kids are not encouraging them to go into teaching? We need more of our best and brightest to go into teaching.        

Does anyone else see the dichotomy of these two positions?  How do we fix this? 

Thank you for reading.  

Weekly Round Up (2)

2,000 Hours -Charles Ripley is beginning a blog where he will document exactly how many hours he spends working for his job as a teacher.  He expects to spend over 2,000 hours in the next year.  I think this is an intriguing idea.  It is coming from a teacher with five years of experience.  If you start paying attention now you are getting in on the ground floor as he is just about to start recording his time.

Lists of Top Schools:  Let the Numbers Do the Thinking- Patrick Ledesma discusses how the general public only wants our schools to be graded using a simple number system.  This makes me sad.   

eLearning Update:  Data Transparency vs. Student Privacy - Katie Ash shares the negative side of having grades and homework information easily accessible to parents via technology.  This intrigued me because all I hear it works is the positives.   

Just enough information to permit practice and no more - Clive Shepherd reminds us of a critical point about providing training to others.  I love posts that remind us of the basics.  

  

Is it possible to get every student to pass a test?

I heard a story from a teacher today about one of her students who took the Standards of Learning (SOL) test recently.  This student came in on the morning of the test and promptly told her teacher that she was going to fail the SOL.  Now just a few days earlier this student had taken a practice SOL and scored well into the 500s.  (For those of you who are not familiar with Virginia's testing system you need a 400 to pass and 600 is the max score.)  This student had solid grades all year and had demonstrated time and time again that she knew the information she was being taught.  She had learned that year.

How do you think that student did on her SOL test?









She didn't pass.  You know why?  She had a fight with her grandmother that morning, which happened to be the morning that she took the SOL test.   Her mind that morning was on anything but the test. 

Was that SOL test an accurate reflection of this students knowledge?
Was it an accurate reflection of the teachers performance with that student?

I hope I live to see a better system put in place to judge the quality of our teachers and our schools.

What do you think? 

Thank you for reading. 


   

Reflecting Hope Weekly Round Up

Ok so this is a little late, but I am hoping to do a weekly round up of blog articles that caught my eye on education that I think are worth others reading.  These were from last week.      

Paradox of the pink slip - Diana Senecahl explores how the Paradox of the Court relates to the school turn around strategy of firing more than 50 percent of a schools staff.  I had never heard of the Paradox of the Court before and found this article interesting.  

 Move Over iPad!  Google Chrome Notebooks are Going to Be the Game Changer in Education  - Lisa Nielsen discusses Google's new laptop program for schools and how it might change the way we do school.  I was not convinced    

On Time Horizons and Education Outcomes -  Jeffrey R. Henig talks about how education policy has lost sight of the long run by focusing too much on short term results.  I think this hits home big time with our year to year performance tests and this idea of value added measurements for teachers. 

Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit -Rick Hess shares the round up from an AEI conference exploring the strengths and weaknesses of federal government involvement in education.  I included this because the conference sounded interesting and I wanted to go explore the resources more. 

Check them out and let me know what you think.  Thanks for reading. 

What we spend to educate our children in Virginia

According to the Virginia government $ 4,714,536,188 was spent on public K-12 education for the 2010/2011 school year.  That is four billion with a "B". 

According to the the 2011 US Census there are 1,574,060 people aged 5 to 19 in Virginia which I am using as a rough approximation of the total number of school aged children in the state.

That means the state of Virginia spends $2995.14 per student.

I took it a step further and looked at spending per pupil for the Williamsburg James City County School Division (WJCC) and the York County School Division (YCS).  Those are two of the local divisions around where I live.  Each local school division gets money from its local government for education.  To calculate these numbers I took the total student enrollment for 2010 and the final budgeted amount for 2010.  I got the information from both of the school division websites from various documents.  WJCC spent $10382.92 per student and YCS spent $9826.28 per student.    

The numbers from the local divisions include the money from the state of Virginia. 
The spending by school divisions incorporates more than just instruction.  It also includes transportation, administration, athletics, nursing, special education, facilities, and other supportive tasks.

I am obviously making some large generalizations by not drilling down into more specifics about the numbers; however, I do feel that this gives a good overview of the investment made by the local communities and the state on behalf of children and their education. 

Sources:
http://dpb.virginia.gov/budget/buddoc11/agency.cfm?agency=197
http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk
http://www.wjcc.k12.va.us/

http://yorkcountyschools.org/

We already have school choice

Last time I talked a little bit about what school choice might look like.  Today I wanted to mention another aspect of school choice, the fact that it already exists. 

Look no further than real estate prices for evidence.  Houses with good schools cost more because people are willing to pay more to get into those good schools.  One local example here in Virginia is a development called Kiln Creek.  It straddles two local government jurisdictions, York County and Newport News.  I compared similar sized houses that I believe are no more than a half a mile apart in the same neighborhood.  What do you think the price difference is between the one in the better school district versus the one in the not as good school district.  It is a $100,000 difference.  I recognize that other factors influence a consumers decision to purchase a house beyond just schools, but a quick glance at many real estate search websites will show that schools is an option that consumers can look at when reviewing houses. 

The problem with this kind of school choice is that it favors the wealthy and affluent significantly more than the poor because it is far easier for them to move into areas with excellent school systems.

This begs the question, are good schools good on their own or are they good because they attract the best students?

What do you think?  Is this a fair assessment of how things work today in our society?  Thank you for reading.  

A friend recently commented that he wanted the ability to choose where his kid goes to school.  He wanted to be a consumer.  He wanted a marketplace of school options that would allow him to pick where he could send his children to be educated. It sounds good on the surface right? It is what we do each and every day when it comes to consumer products.  We look for the option that best meet our need and then go purchase that option.

If we dive into the idea of offering a choice of schools a little bit more we start to run into some stark realities.  My first question would be who provides the schools?  Will it be the government or the private sector?  If it is the private sector only, what do you do for the children who come from families that could not afford to educate their children?  Do we want to be part of a society where education is not universally available to everyone?  That starts to sound very third world to me.   I believe very strongly that everyone should have access to a decent education up to a certain point.  That is the foundation upon which I build my arguments.

Let’s say that the government provides a minimum stipend to families that cannot afford schooling.  At what level would you cut off that stipend?  I think this idea of support creates a really touchy political issue, one that could be incredibly divisive.  Just look at Medicare, social security, and welfare benefits to get a sense of how touchy this might be.  Another issue I see with this idea is that you would have schooling segregated by socioeconomic class in this scenario.  I think there is great value in the mixing of everyone for a shared educational experience.        

If the government is still running schools, but families are free to decide where their children go you would see huge demand for the "best" schools.  What parents in their right mind would knowingly choose to send their child to a mediocre or bad school when they could just as easily send them to a good school.  I think you see this idea playing out when charter schools are forced to run lotteries to determine who gets into a school.  I don't see a lot of value in a system where everyone is always trying to go to the best school.  I think that creates a lot instability and turmoil in an area that should be as stable as possible.        

So looking at these options, how do you institute choice into the educational environment in a meaningful way while still offering universal access to education for everyone?  I am all ears if you have a good option.

What do you think?  Am I getting this right?  Do you agree with my arguments?  Post a comment and let me know.  Thank you for reading.    

Is your school a "failing school?"

It is SOL season here in the state of Virginia.  Students are taking a test which determines if their school will meet adequate yearly progress AYP or not.  That one measure determines if a school is deemed to be successful or a "failing school."   I just read the other day that the term "failing school" didn't really enter the public conversation until the onset of No Child Left Behind. 


I think it is pretty sad that we choose to measure the quality of our schools on one set of tests.  It doesn't take into account all of the other things that our schools do.  We don't test students on how they are learning to behave in society or how compassionate they are, or on how well they can sing or play an instrument.  With regards to AYP we don't care about their knowledge of social studies or science.  It is focused only on English and mathematics.  

The ridiculousness of this system is that one elementary school in the division that I work for is considered a "failing school" because one subset of the student population failed to meet the AYP in one subject.  The overall scores were good enough to pass.  I hear that the stress on those teachers this year has been really hard on a lot of them.   

I think we can do better.  We should keep testing schools so that we have data to work from, but we need to stop punishing schools for things that might not be in their control to fix.

What do you think?  Am I right or wrong?  Why?    

The Police and Crime Analogy

Diane Ravitch shared this analogy when she spoke at William and Mary last year and I like it.

What if we passed a law that required all police departments to reduce the crime rate in their jurisdiction to zero percent.  Since doing something like that takes time, the law would be set up so that the police have ten years to meet the target.  To help them reach the target, each year they would have to meet a crime rate target that was lower than the previous year until they got to a state of no crime in the tenth year.  This sounds like a reasonable thing for a police department to do, right?

Now what happens if we also include in that law a punishment for police departments that do not meet the yearly targets?  If you don't do your job, you would be punished right?  If a police department does not meet the yearly targets they will lose funding, be forced to go through reorganization including the firing of police officers deemed to be not doing enough to reduce the crime rate, and could possibly be closed down in favor of new privately run police departments.   

Does something like this make sense?



Replace police departments with schools, crime rate with test scores, flip zero to one hundred, and police officers to teachers and you have our current education system.

Tenure Kills Motivation

Think about it.  Would you work as hard if you knew that getting fired was very difficult for your boss to do because it cost a lot of money and involved him or her filling out a lot of paperwork?  I know my wife would still work hard because she is that kind of person, but I also know that there are plenty of people who would take advantage of those circumstances. 

Tenure in K-12 public education offers that kind of working environment.

The difficult thing about tenure is that it creates a situation where some people don't but forth their very best effort and it also makes it difficult to get rid of those very same people.  A teacher who is not giving 110 percent of what they have to give to their students is doing their students and their community a disservice.  Tenure allows some people to not be as motivated and thus not help students succeed as much as they could be.

I am glad that I work in a school division where I don't see a lot of this lack of motivation.  I do see some of it though and it breaks my heart. 

What do you think?  Does this argument make sense?  Have you experienced a teacher who was going through the motions? 

Tenure Protects Bad Teachers but not as many as you think.

The first and most obvious negative of tenure is that it protects the occasional teacher who really should not be teaching.  Because of tenure protections, it is much more difficult for school divisions to get rid of ineffective teachers.  Research has shown that ineffective teachers hurt students’ academic performance.  Thus tenure hurts some students’ performance.     

I do want to point out that the number of truly ineffective teachers is not nearly as large as most people think.  I can only speak from my personal experiences working at two elementary schools in one of the better school divisions in the state so I may be underestimating the number of teachers who really should not be teaching.  Out of a total of about 60 teachers that I work with I would say that only two or three really should not be teaching.  That is five percent of the workforce.   

That matches up with the same assertions that Rick Hess makes in his blog post ""Many" Teaching Who Shouldn't Be".  I did the math and his numbers equal about five percent of the teaching workforce as well. 

To me the issue is really one of flexibility.  Schools should be able to adapt their workforce as necessary to meet the demands of their students.  Tenure gets in the way of that flexibility.  

What do you think?  Thanks for reading.  

Tenure Protects Good Teachers from Bad People

Another positive of tenure in K-12 public education is that it helps to insulate teachers from being dismissed because of political pressures.  Since all the public school divisions here in Virginia are managed by a board of individuals who are either elected or appointed by people who are elected, there exists the possibility that teachers could be fired for teaching or acting in a way that those school board members do not approve of.  A possible example of this is if you had an overly conservative school board which made it a point of trying to fire teachers who were registered and active in a more liberal political party.  Tenure provides an additional layer of protection from the political process. 

Another way in which tenure offers protection to teachers is from administrators who hold some kind of grudge against an individual.  With tenure, good teachers would be more protected from abritrary firings if a bad principal came along or from an overly emotional principal.  One could argue that this helps to keep good teachers in a school division even in a principal is not so good.

The final bad person that tenure protects teachers from, are parents.  Because teachers are typically responsible for a wide range of students, the odds of coming across a parent who disagrees with the teacher or their methods are pretty good.  Tenure provides an additional protection to teachers from parents who might make a considerable protest in an attempt to remove a teacher that they don't agree with or like.

What do you think about these arguments?  Do they make sense?   

Coming up next, the negatives of tenure.  Thanks for reading. 

Tenure Saves Taxpayers Money Again

Here in Virginia it takes three years to earn our version of tenure.  Once earned, you maintain your tenured status for as long as you continue to work for that school division. Thus tenure creates an incentive for teachers to stick with a division over the long run.  Teachers stay with a division to earn tenure status and then continue with a division to maintain it.  It could be argued then that tenure helps to keep teacher turnover lower than it might otherwise be.  Lower turnover reduces the costs incurred by a division to recruit and train new teachers.  So again tenure saves taxpayers money by reducing costs, this time ones associated with recruitment, training, and retention.  

What do you think?  Does the argument make sense?       

Tenure Saves Tax Payers Money?

Tenure is a benefit in the K-12 education environment.  As such, it has value to those who earn it or are striving to earn it.  If tenure is taken away, I think you would see a demand from teachers for increased pay to compensate for the loss of the benefit of tenure over the long run.  Since tax payers ultimately bear the cost of public K-12 education, I argue that tenure is currently saving tax payers money by keeping wages lower than they otherwise would need to be to attract qualified people to the teaching profession.

While tenure is not the only factor that influences someone in making a decision to become a teacher, I do believe that they are willing to trade reduced salary in exchange for the additional job security and protection that comes with tenure.  

What do you think?  Is this a rational argument? 




 
 

It is finished....The end of Capstone

Just as JC said, it is finished, so to is the Capstone course that I am taking.  Writing this blog post is the final activity I have to do for the course, assuming my portfolio is approved.  I think it will be.  Looking back on my experiences, if I were going to redesign it here is what I would do. 

• Do a better job of getting participants to begin planning for their portfolios in the introduction course.  Everything I did in intro, I couldn't use for Capstone I or II. 
• Increase the time of the Intro class and shift some of the work from Capstone I into the Intro class.  I found Capstone I to be the most work intensive of all three courses. 
• Change the way the portfolios are done so that Capstone I creates about half of the Capstone II portfolio at the proficient level.  Then have the Capstone II class finish the portfolio.  
• Figure out how to have better discussion prompts that actually lead to discussion rather than people posting information.   
• Cut down on the busy work and increase the challenging cognitive thinking work.  This course was way to repetitive in what they asked you to do.  I want a challenge, not busy work.    
• Put all the information for an assignment in ONE PLACE!!!!!!!  I went crazy having to read three different things to try and understand what was expected for all these assignments.  
• If it is important, make sure it is in a rubric.  I had a couple of instances where I lost points because I failed to do something that was not listed in the rubric.  
• Require facilitators to have grades submitted by a certain time or students get an automatic A.  I had a professor do that with a class once.  I think its a fair exchange.  I had some issues with a facilitator and grades in Capstone I.  
• I am still waiting to find out what the difference is between Personalization and Customization.  In the world of education those two are pretty much the same thing.  
• I would make sure that all the links work properly, BEFORE sending students to them.  
• I would also pick either an ITRT type indivual or a teacher and design the course more towards them.  This course squence seems to see-saw back and forth between the two making it more challenging.     
• Finding better articles on technology integration.  Too many articles I read had a great idea in the abstract, but did not provide the kind of practical examples that give me ideas on how to incorporate it into my own teaching. 

Ok a couple of things I did like about the course:

• I learned more about technology integration and the NETS-T/S
• The curb cut idea is a really good one.  See universal design in learning for more information. 
• Forcing us to blog has been good because I can look back on my posts and see learning taking place.  
• The discussion board rules are great.  Forcing people to actually say stuff that enhances the conversation rather than just agreeing.  Requiring a post by a certain time was also good.  It keeps the conversation moving.  Also, the idea that everyone has to have a response before you add a second comment to someones post.  That was another good idea.  
• I also liked how we were required to keep a digital bookmarking file.  I am going to keep using mine once I delete all the Capstone 1 or Capstone 2 tags. 
• The courses helped me bond with my new co-workers as we lamented the course and its work.

Final recommendation to people thinking about taking the Capstone course is to say its not worth it.  I would have been really mad if I had to pay to take these courses.   

Share the Wealth Presentation for Capstone II

This is a quick five minute video explaining what the Capstone Sequence is and what I learned from it.  I created it using PowerPoint and PhotoStory 3.  It highlights the positive aspects of the course. 

Yes it was a class project called Share the Wealth. 

I also want to take a minute to talk about some of the negative aspects of the Capstone sequence that I am almost finished with. 

1.  Repetitive busy work:  I felt like these courses repeated themselves with the work that they asked for between the three courses and with in the courses themselves.  The course felt like it was designed by committee.  I would have liked some more efficiency.    

2.  Poorly organized:  The course did a terrible job of putting everything you needed to know about an assignment in one place.  You had the directions from the course timeline, the rubrics, and then they syllabus.  I even had instances where points were taken away for something I had no idea needed to be included.  They have too much information spread out.  They need to consolidate.  

3.  Too dependent on the faciliator.  For two of my three courses I had an excellent facilitator who really helped to make these shortcomings less of an issue; however, for one of the courses I had a bad facilitator who only exacerbated these issues.  I think this course can be better designed to eliminate some of those issues.  

I don't think I will be recommending this course to other teachers.  Too much work for too little learning gain.  I got a better handle on technology integration in the classroom and the NETS-T from one 12 week course I took in graduate school than I did with this thirty week sequence.     

Grades are so 20th Century

To change our current educational outcomes, schools need to change the way they collect and use data.

The current model starts with students completing assignments handed out by a teacher.  The teacher grades those assignments and then enters the grade into a gradebook.  As a grading period progresses the teacher creates a collection of  graded assignments which form an overall picture of a students progress and knowledge.  These grades, both for the individual assignment and for the grading period, represent the bulk of the recorded data collected by teachers about students.

Additionally here in Virginia, students will take a Standards of Learning (SOL) test for certain subjects upon completion of those classes.  This serves as an additional form of data collected on that student, but those tests are not designed to compare a students individual progress from year to year.   

The problem with this data is it can be subjective.  It is dependent upon the teacher to create these assignments in such a way as to properly evaluate the students knowledge.  Yet so many other factors come into play with this data.  Grades encompass more then just what students know.  For example, a homework grade might be influenced by when a student turns it in.  Many teachers that I know take points off from students who do not turn in homework on time.   That grade then is not merely a reflection of student knowledge, but also a measure of a students work habits.  

Another issue with the current grade system, is the lack of consistency between a grade from one teacher and a grade from another teacher even when they teach the same subject.  Each teacher creates their own system for grading.  One teacher might say that tests are worth 50 percent of an overall grade while a different teacher might say only 35 percent.  One teacher might give zeros for late homework, while another might give students two weeks to turn it in for a reduced grade.  This creates discrepancies between students.  One students A might be another students B.   

We take all of these pieces of information put it all together into a messy formula and come up with one letter or number grade that is supposed to represent the students understanding of the knowledge being taught to them. 

We can do better....

Instead lets move to a system that actually shows student performance in each of these different measures rather than one letter or number grade with a couple of comments to denote a students knowledge.  We should use technological tools to collect data on what students know coming into a class and then what they learned coming out of it.  That way we can actually measure true learning gains.  Lets harness the powers of technology to create learning environments that let students explore topics at their own pace.  We can use a model like that of the School of One or of the Khan Academy.  Then instead of showing a student has a C+ we can say that they have mastered the Reformation, but are still struggling with the French Revolution and the Interwar period.  Additionally, we can include non-learning information on work habits like showing how often a student turns their homework in on time.  Wouldn't parents want to know this kind of information?  Wouldn't teachers want to have this detailed information on their students?  

The tools exist to implement this kind of schooling.  Some are already doing it.  I think the education profession (myself included) should be doing more to make this a reality for education as a whole.

Do you agree?             

Capstone II Session 5

The theme for this session is Bloom's taxonomy.  For those of you who are not of the educational world, Bloom's taxonomy is six levels of cognitive thought moving from the low knowing and understanding something to creating and evaluating on the higher end.  I was asked to read an article entitled, "The New Bloom" by David Cochran and Jack Conklin with Susannah Modin.  It provided an overview of the updates to Bloom's taxonomy, the original was writen in the 1950s, and briefly touched on how the taxonomy needs to be connected with to technologies use in the classroom.

Next on the agendaI was a blog post from Steve Hargadon entitled, "Long handled spoons and Collaborative Technologies".  I really liked Steve's line of thinking about Web 2.0 tools and thought some of his inisights on early adopters and then company adopters of these technologies were very astute.  I agree whole heartedly that this new world is relying more and more on trust and authenticity.  I loved his line, "First of all, ideas have always been easy--it's the execution that is hard." because it is so true.  I am full of ideas, but executing those ideas, that is actually making them happen, is incredibly hard to do.  He follows that up with another astute observation, "I've also found that my really good ideas don't end up actually being really good without input from others."  He is actually making an arguement I have heard already from Seth Godin.  The idea of gathering together a "tribe" of people to create good works.  Seth's been promoting this idea for some time.  I am curious now if Steve is a reader of Seth's. 

The final article of this session was one called "Communication and Collaboration 2.0" by Anita McAnear.  Nothing shocking in this article.  She does make an interesting point that the two most valuable skills needed for our culture is what she calls collective intelligence or the ability to work with others in a smart fashion and negotiation. 

Comparing the two articles, I felt like Steve had a lot more interesting and creative ideas, whereas Anita was just kind of throwing some stuff out there in a short little one page article. 

Capstone II Session 4

The first article in the docket for this session is a real snoozer.  "Global Education On a Dime:  A Low-Cost Way to Connect" by Alexander Russo on the Edutopia website shares some free resources to help classrooms around the world connect for learning.  The article talks about locating globally connected resources in your community first.  It encourages teachers to focus on content and not technology.  Then it shares a list of free collaborative tools and ends with a note on about dealing with time differences.  Nothing in this article was new to me.

Next up was "Behavyourself.com:  Online Manners Matter," by Laila Weir.  The general idea is that teaching online behavior is important and should be done in schools.  The one true benefit of this article is the list of netiquette rules that it has at the end of the article.  Again nothing I didn't already know about.

The third reading was "Passport to Digital Citizenship," by Mike Ribble.  While I don't like the heavy emphasis on the ISTE standards at the beginning, I do like some of the things Mike says at the end.  Specifically I like his comments about "gearing down" where students actually have to get rid of or stop using technologies that they use at home when they come to school.  I also like the nine standards that are mentioned.  As always I would like to see some more concrete examples of each, rather than the pie in the sky academic writing.  I do like his idea of having a common language when it comes to technology between the home and the school.   

The program shared a few other web resources related to internet safety that I was already aware of.  (Are you sensing a trend yet?) 

Thank goodness for IT techs

I learned

• to check and make sure the tool you need to fix the problem  is working BEFORE you create the problem...
• that when the laptops we use at work can not find the network they operate under a temporary setting which causes the user to FREAK OUT because they think all of their files are gone...
• that just because I do this real cool technological thing in the classroom it doesn't mean that it was a good instructional practice
• how my works network is set up  

I was reminded

• to see the good in people rather than the bad and that no matter what a person looks like, they are still a person worthy of love...
• how important it is to talk with my wife on a regular basis.... 
• that Jesus died for our mistakes 

Capstone II Session 3

Sometimes I wonder why I can't take a simple idea and turn it into a cash cow like the folks at Big6 did. The process they came up with is what most people go through anyway. They just managed to translate it into words and create a whole bunch of things to help students work through it.

Next up in this session was an article entitled, "Evaluating & Using Web Based Sources," by Glenn Bull, Gina Bull, Kara Dawson, and Cheryl Mason. It is a ten year old article that is already dating itself to some extent; however, it does include some interesting bits of information. One such bit of information was the process for evaluating web sources. It looks like this:

1. Identification of Potential Resources
2. Evaluation of Appropriate Resources
3. Integration into the Research Paper
4. Citation of the Resource
5. Verification by the Instructor

The article does not talk enough about focusing ones search for information on good sources rather than scouring the net for information. In today's internet its more about figuring out where to go to get information rather than trying to evaluate what comes up in a Google search (which the article does not even mention). I do like how this article breaks down the evaluation of a web source into three areas authority, domain, and consistency.

I had not really considered before how important it is for the teacher to back check all web based sources. I see how important it is to make sure students are citing good sources and to correc that if not; however, this adds a huge time burden to teachers already hectic schedules.

The next article, "Connecting Depth and Balance in Class," by Matthew Kuhn explored how educational technology is matching up with some traditional learning taxonomies.  Much to my surprise my own school district and team was mentioned as having partaken in the authors study on this subject.  This of course took place prior to my joining the team.  Basically his take is that technology is going to make it easier to teach across multiple intelligences and to address the variety of levels in Blooms taxonomy.  Nothing earth shattering in this article. 

Continuing through this session's reading list I found "The Personalization of Reading and Learning," by Tyler on the On Our Minds Blog on Scholastic's website.  The premise of the post is that the spread of technology is requiring schools to do more to customize individual learning experiences.  My issue with using this for a class, which my Capstone II course just did, is that it does not say anything else of relevance in the article. 

Hoping to find something more engaging and exciting I turned to "Personalized Learning Puts Students In A Class of Their Own," from the Science Daily website.  I am a HUGE supporter of the idea the article mentions when it says, "In fact, the image of classrooms as 'knowledge factories' has not changed much since the Industrial Revolution, despite the major advances in teaching methods that have occurred.  This model holds that teachers input information, pupils process it, and out comes the learning in neat little packages."  I would add that those neat little packages are grades.  The article even mentions how the shift to standardized curriculum makes it harder to offer personalized learning experiences.  After all that exciting introductory material things get decidedly less exciting as they begin explaining the iClass project.  As far as I can tell the project allows teachers to set goals, sub-goals, and suggested studies and then it sets the student free to meet them.  For an article on this project, it does a great job of not really telling you anything about it. 

So now I am left with the last article for the session.  Will it redeem the session or continue the trend of poor articles?  The article comes from the website Tech&Learning, which gives me hope.  The article is called "Creating a Technology Climate Where the Self-directed Learner is Nurtured," and it is written by Rickey Moroney.  As I began to read things were looking good.  The article was talking about how a teacher uses rubrics to help students self-evaluate their work as they progressed through a major project in a middle school social studies class.  I really liked the idea of assessing students understanding of the project itself.  It makes sense that for large complex projects students might not understand all that we ask of them.  I also like the way the author focuses on securing multiple sets of data to find answers to the questions he asks about how well is project is working.  While more detailed then necessary, I think this was a good practical example of how major projects can be effective teaching tools in the classroom.  With all such ideas, my only major concern is the time required to do something like this is significant and can possibly interfere with the need to cover a set amount of content prior to a high stakes test. 

As to the prompt that asks, "Is the iClass model from the ScienceDaily article a realistic model for the lesson you are creating?"  I say that the article did not provide enough information for me to model anything after it. 

The finaly question prompt says "What are realistic expectations for self-assessment by the students who will participate in the lesson you are designing?"  With the lesson I am designing I think the opportunities for reflection plus the voting at the end of the lesson will serve as good measures of self-assessment by the students. 
 

Are Libraries Doomed?

So I had a chance to participate in a focus group for the first time tonight. It was put on at the Business School and the topic was the library. It was really cool being part of a group of seven people from different walks of life and various areas of town, getting together to talk about a topic. It was an invigorating sense of community. We covered a lot of ground and hit on such ideas as:

• the physical space of the library,
  
• should the library include a coffee bar,
  
• how can they get more computers,
  
• what skills will a librarian need in the future,
  
• should they sell video games,
  
• what will the library look like in five or ten years, and
  
• will e-books make libraries obsolete.

That last one really got my attention. I have certainly spent some time thinking about whether or not books will disappear as we move to digital content. It has been a personal debate because I see more and more people like my mother-in-law and my brother get kindles. Personally, I like the feel of books and the ability to have and to hold it. Not to mention that I don't complete trust digital content to always be there. Nothing that I have seen digitally yet gets at that feeling that comes from holding and reading a book. I recognize though that my appreciation for books came when I was younger and did so much reading. I don't know that the kids of today are getting that same set of interactions and they have more trust in digital content than I do.

What do you think? Do you think libraries are doomed to go the way of the milk man?

Capstone II Session 2 Reflection

In "Developing Metacognition" by Elaine Blakey and Sheila Spence talk about three basic metacognitive strategies. The first involves making connections between old knowledge and new knowledge. The second is the ability to select the right strategy when approaching a problem or situation. The third is being able to plan, monitor, and evaluate the thinking process. Then they present six strategies for utilizing metacognition. The first is to make a list of what you know and what you would like to find out at the onset of a particular research question. The second is having a discussion about the process of thinking. The third is to write about your thinking. The fourth is to give students the training necessary to help them plan and self regulate their learning exploration. The authors break out steps five and six into distinctive categories. Step five is debriefing and step six is self evaluation. Personally I think those two steps fall into the same category of evaluating how the process went. Nothing earth shattering in this article.

The next article was "High Tech Reflection strategies Make Learning Stick" by Suzie Boss. The article begins with a nice story of how blogging can be used as a tool for reflection and the positive impact it had on two students. Great idea I thought, but what were the details in its implementation. I don't know how that teacher used it in the classroom, so I don't really know how effective it might be in my classroom. Another idea mentioned in the article was to create a video confessional corner, like they have in reality tv, for students to use to record their thoughts on the how the learning process was going. I liked this idea, but had concerns about how some students might treat it. The article also mentioned some of the pitfalls of reflection, urging readers to stay away from rote responses and predictability. The article encouraged teachers to use thought provoking questions and to model reflection to the students. Overall, I liked how this article encouraged reflection and the added value that technology can bring to the process.

The third article was titled, "Students Thrive on Cooperation and Problem Solving" and it was written by Bob Pearlman. Bob starts this article off on the right foot by going right after NCLB and the idea that unlimited funding can help education in of themselves. He then moves on to say that problem based learning or PBL can help develop the skills necessary for students to succeed in the 21st century. For those of you unfamiliar with PBL it requires that students work together to answer complex questions about real world items. It also requires that students create something to show off what they learned in engaging the problem. I really like how this article mentions eight key standards to include in every project. These eight standards have students

1. work in teams to learn how to collaborate
2. take on critical problems to learn critical thinking
3. present what they find to learn oral communication
4. write to learn written communication
5. use technology to learn how to use technology
6. address global and real world issues to learn citizenship skills
7. do internships to learn about careers
8. research through the process of all of the above to learn content

Then the article channels some of my former professors ideas of multi-disciplinary projects. Then they talk about the need to do a better job of grading. Moving beyond the simple letter grade to reports that actually show how students are doing with various skills. I am encouraged to read that this form of learning is challenging to implement from a teaching stand point, but that it is necessary because the rest of the world is working hard to catch up to us.