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.