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I’m a big fan of the videos from Common Craft. I use them constantly in my classes and workshops. Their newest video is Social Media in Plain English:
I also ran across the Mr. Winkle Wakes video today (hat tip to Jon Becker):
The publicity grows regarding our collective ideas for active summer learning with technology. In addition to appearing on the ISU News Service home page and in the Ames (IA) Tribune, I also have been interviewed by both Radio Iowa and WHO Radio. Next Tuesday is Iowa Public Radio: live, between 12:20pm and 12:35pm Central (feel free to call in and ask a question)!
Thanks, everyone, for your contributions!
It’s the end of the school year and it’s time for a new contest. In honor of Mike Schmoker’s classic Crayola Curriculum article…
Last October I blogged about my son’s assignment to write down all the numbers between 1,000 and 2,000. Here’s another dismaying class assignment:
State Floats
- should be the size of an inverted shoebox
- basic box should be covered (paper, paint, tissue, etc.)
- do not have to have wheels
- should include state name prominently displayed
- should represent your chosen state - should have 2 or more items of importance from your state (ex: famous landmarks, crops, products, natural resources, state flowers/birds, etc.)
- should be colorful (may use such items as crepe paper, construction paper, giftwrap, plastic figures, silk flowers, popsicle sticks, cotton balls, foam, styrofoam, cardboard, foil, paint, clay, felt, etc.) - be creative!
- must be accompanied by a 5 x 8 card listing
- state name
- student's name
- geographic region the state is in
- 3 important things the state is known for
- 1 "interesting fact" about the state
Floats must be completed and ready for “parade” on Friday, May 23.
Presentations
Students will be presenting their floats to all of the other 4th graders. They will be shoring the information from their 5 x 8 cards (listed above), and they will need to give a brief explanation of their float.
The floats will also be on display at the [school name] State Fair.
Your turn. What you got? Deadline for submissions is June 10. Please either comment below or link back to this post from your own blog. Winner gets everlasting fame and a CASTLE mug!
Update: See the winning entry!
I really liked this image of the inverted U from Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability so I decided to make my own version:
I’m a strong proponent of data-driven practice, particularly for classroom- and student-level progress monitoring of essential learning outcomes. But, as Morville notes, there are diminishing (and even negligible) returns if one goes too far. We have to know when to say when.
Today we officially topped 60 participants for CASTLE's first annual summer book club. That's great! - and many more people than I ever anticipated - but it also presents some challenges...
If anyone has any ideas on either of these fronts - thoughts regarding group size and/or what good tools might be for this - I'm open to suggestions. I need to make some decisions soon. Sign-up ends June 1 and we start June 9!
Anything else I should be thinking about? I'm excited to get going!
For those of you who are interested, here are the current standings for BlogBall08, our edubloggers’ fantasy baseball league…
Wow. Could The Age of the Millenials have been any more one-sided? I know the audience for 60 Minutes skews older but this episode was pretty over the top, even for a generation gap story (hat tip to the Twitterverse). Here are a few phrases from the episode:
Where is the understanding that every generation is different than those that came before? Where is the recognition of the many talents that the Millenials bring to the workplace? Where is the idea that perhaps these millenials have a pretty keen understanding of their current worth in the American employment market?
Did there have to be so much grumpiness? Are the boomers just reaping what they sowed?
Quick! Name a long term, substantive, sustainable change that occurred in your organization without the active support of your leadership. I'll wait...
That's what I thought. Now why aren't you paying more attention to the learning needs of your administrators?
Postman & Weingartner (1968, p. 23) noted:
Knowledge is produced in response to questions. And new knowledge results from the asking of new questions; quite often new questions about old questions. Here is the point: Once you have learned how to ask questions - relevant and appropriate and substantial questions - you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know. . . . The most important intellectual ability man has yet developed - the art and science of asking questions - is not taught in school! Moreover it is not "taught" in the most devastating way possible: by arranging the environment so that significant question asking is not valued.
In the news this week, a teacher may get fired because his students thought and acted independently?
More than 160 students in six different classes at Intermediate School 318 in the South Bronx - virtually the entire eighth grade - refused to take last Wednesday's three-hour practice exam for next month's statewide social studies test. Instead, the students handed in blank exams. Then they submitted signed petitions with a list of grievances to school Principal Maria Lopez and the Department of Education. . . . School administrators blamed the boycott on a 30-year-old probationary social studies teacher, Douglas Avella. . . . A few days later, in a reprimand letter, Lopez accused Avella of initiating the boycott and taking "actions [that] caused a riot at the school." . . . "They're saying Mr. Avella made us do this," said Johnny Cruz, 15, another boycott leader. "They don't think we have brains of our own, like we're robots. We students wanted to make this statement. The school is oppressing us too much with all these tests."
After much deliberation and several delays, Wesley Fryer and I have picked a winner for the NECC button design contest. We had 22 different button submissions. We narrowed it down to 5 finalists, did some rank ordering, and then I made the ultimate call (so blame me, not Wesley, if yours didn’t get chosen). All the submissions were much better than anything I would have designed, so I’m glad that we had the contest!
Kudos to Bill Moseley for having the winning design. As promised, Bill receives everlasting fame, a CASTLE mug, one of the buttons, a t-shirt with his design on it, a picture of a monster from my 4-year-old (Colin’s the one with the curly hair), and a copy of Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. Nice work, Bill!
[update: Bill has released this image with a Creative Commons license, saying, "Share it with anyone and everyone. This is about communicating the idea, right? If my image helps, then great!"]
A big, big thanks to everyone who participated. I will bring several hundred of the buttons to Edubloggercon 2008 and will give them out there and throughout NECC until they’re gone. If your design wasn’t selected, I’ll save you a button in San Antonio. If you’re not attending NECC and submitted a design, e-mail me your mailing address and I’ll send you a button!
One of the perks of being named a Leader in Learning by the cable industry is that you usually get a profile in its monthly magazine. This month’s issue of Cable in the Classroom magazine features yours truly. They labeled me a ‘tech evangelist,’ which is true enough. I thought the short piece was well done and was pleased to see that they also included a link to my podcast interview from last June. I’m still a little freaked by the fact that my mug is on the cover of a magazine (that’s Wikinomics under my hand, by the way)…
I’m going to try something new this summer. I just finished reading Influencer: The power to change anything. It’s possibly the best leadership book that I’ve read in years and I’m itching to discuss it with someone. So I decided to see if I can get an online book club up and running this summer. If you’re interested, read on…
Getting started
Commitments
Schedule
This offer is open to all leaders and change agents, at whatever level they’re operating (hint: might be a good summer activity for some of your local principals or superintendents?)
I’m looking forward to some powerful discussions. Hope some of you will join me this summer!
[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]
I’m going to do something I’ve never done before as a blogger: resurrect an old post. Over the past few months I’ve read all or some of Innovation Nation, Five Regions of the Future, Sixteen Trends, and The 2010 Meltdown. I then decided it was time to finally read Teaching as a Subversive Activity and The End of Education. So I started on the former and then today I picked up the latest issue of Educational Leadership, which is focused on reshaping high schools. As the echoes of K-12 naysayers reverberated through my head, I found myself asking once again:
So what if schools don’t adjust to the demands of the digital, global economy? So what if schools don’t prepare kids for the 21st century?
As McLuhan stated, school may be irrelevant. As Wiener noted, schools may shield children from reality. As Gardner said, schools may educate for obsolescence. As Bruner stated, schools may not develop intelligence. As Rogers noted, schools may not promote significant learnings. As Friedenberg said, schools may punish creativity and independence [all closely quoted from Postman & Weingartner, 1968, p. xiv). And yet the economy chugs along, sometimes up, sometimes down, but mostly up. And the overall well-being of most citizens continues to improve by most historical measures.
So, without further ado, below is my post from March 2007, which I’m hoping will spark some additional conversation 14 months later, particularly now that both the TechLearning blog and Dangerously Irrelevant have larger audiences. I hope you find the post to still be as challenging and relevant today as I do.
– – – – –
[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]
[Law students learn to argue both sides of any issue because as attorneys they may be hired for either side of a case. Knowledge of the other side’s arguments also allows attorneys to counter those arguments and thus strengthen their own side. So with that in mind, here’s a little contrarian perspective on School 2.0. As technology advocates, we must be able to offer real solutions, not just empty rhetoric.]
Dear School 2.0 advocates,
We’ve heard it all before. The sky is falling. America is in danger of losing its role as lead actor on the global stage. What else is new?
National commissions? Esteemed task forces? Corporate leaders as education critics? We’ll see your Bill Gates and raise you a Sputnik.
We heard it in the 1950s:
We are engaged in a grim duel. We are beginning to recognize the threat to American technical supremacy which could materialize if Russia succeeds in her ambitious program of achieving world scientific and engineering supremacy by turning out vast numbers of well-trained scientists and engineers. . . We have let our educational problem grow much too big for comfort and safety. We are beginning to see now that we must solve it without delay. - Admiral Hyman Rickover, 1959
We heard it in the 1980s:
The risk is not only that the Japanese make automobiles more efficiently than Americans and have government subsidies for development and export. It is not just that the South Koreans recently built the world's most efficient steel mill, or that American machine tools, once the pride of the world, are being displaced by German products. It is also that these developments signify a redistribution of trained capability throughout the globe. . . If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system for the benefit of all--old and young alike, affluent and poor, majority and minority. Learning is the indispensable investment required for success in the "information age" we are entering. - A Nation at Risk, 1983
We heard it in the 1990s:
America’s education system is broken. - IBM CEO Louis Gerstner, 1994
And we’re hearing it again today:
Whereas for most of the 20th century the United States could take pride in having the best-educated workforce in the world, that is no longer true. Over the past 30 years, one country after another has surpassed us. . . . While our international counterparts are increasingly getting more education, their young people are getting a better education as well. . . . Our relative position in the world's education league tables [continues] its long slow decline. - The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, 2006
America’s high schools are obsolete. - Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, 2005
And yet, somehow, despite our educational system’s long history of alleged mediocrity, our country and our economy keep chugging along quite nicely. Our standard of living is the envy of most of the world. Our gross domestic product per capita literally dwarfs those of China or India, the latest international competition du jour. Despite our country’s creativity-stifling schools, our citizens and workers continue, quite astonishingly, to build upon our nation’s well recognized and long-standing traditions of innovation and excellence to create new products, new systems, and new markets.
We’ve heard it all before. Creative thinking. Problem solving. Independent, self-directed learning. Daniel Pink, Richard Florida, John Seely Brown…
Ho hum. Ever heard of progressive education? The turn of the LAST century? Summerhill? John Dewey? Neil Postman? The 1960s? Been there, done that. Why is THIS time any different? Why is it that THIS time we should replace the entire system?
Yes, we get it. Most kids think schools are boring. Big surprise. John Goodlad told us that long ago. As if we needed ANYONE to tell us that. Isn’t that just the way school is?
Fine. School 2.0 is the “right” thing to do. Technology has the potential to transform education. Our educational institutions could be doing so much more. Educators should feel more of a moral imperative to do things differently. Blah blah blah… Let’s be honest: isn’t this true for ANY bureaucratic government entity? Do we really expect our public schools to be any different?
We’ve heard it all before. The status quo is inadequate. Too many kids drop out, our assessment systems are all wrong, and we’re squandering our children’s future. The problem is that you offer no concrete, tangible, publicly- and politically-viable alternatives.
It’s easy to throw stones at glass houses. It’s much harder to replace a venerable system that’s served us well for a century with something else. The old saw, “Never make a complaint without offering potential solutions” applies here in spades. Just for argument’s sake, let’s say that we “tore down the walls” tomorrow. What would education look like instead? How would we ever get there from where we are now? How are you going to persuade educators, and politicians, and your local community members that this is worth moving toward? That it’s not just pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking?
What’s your plan? We mean a real plan. Not just “kids learning independently on matters of personal interest, taking advantage of the power of digital technology to help them do so.” What will the structures look like? Policies? Laws? Funding streams? How will we know if kids have learned anything important? How will we handle parents’ very real needs for someone to take their kids while they go to work?
Quit offering us wishes. Quit offering us dreams. Quit preaching to us about what is morally right and educationally appropriate. Help us realize, in terms we can understand, what this new thing might actually look like AT SCALE and how we might reasonably get here. Even if we agree with you that this is important, without a vision AND a plan we’re just as stuck as you are.
We’ve heard it all before. What else you got?
Greg Davis, Executive Director of Management Support Services (basically he’s the CTO) for the Des Moines (IA) Public Schools received his doctorate on May 9 from Iowa State University. As his doctoral advisor, I had the pleasure of ‘hooding’ Greg at Commencement.
Simultaneously, up in Minneapolis, another of my doctoral advisees, Lisa Finsness, Director of Instructional Media and Technology for the Osseo (MN) Area Schools, was graduating with her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota (where I used to work).
Please extend hearty kudos to Drs. Davis and Finsness for successfully completing their doctorates. Doctoral programs are long, arduous journeys. They both should be commended for making it through with smiles on their faces!
If you haven’t yet done so, The Rise of the Rest in Newsweek is worth reading. Here’s an excerpt (hat tip to Richard Florida):
American parochialism is particularly evident in foreign policy. Economically, as other countries grow, for the most part the pie expands and everyone wins. But geopolitics is a struggle for influence: as other nations become more active internationally, they will seek greater freedom of action. This necessarily means that America's unimpeded influence will decline. But if the world that's being created has more power centers, nearly all are invested in order, stability and progress. Rather than narrowly obsessing about our own short-term interests and interest groups, our chief priority should be to bring these rising forces into the global system, to integrate them so that they in turn broaden and deepen global economic, political, and cultural ties. If China, India, Russia, Brazil all feel that they have a stake in the existing global order, there will be less danger of war, depression, panics, and breakdowns. There will be lots of problems, crisis, and tensions, but they will occur against a backdrop of systemic stability. This benefits them but also us. It's the ultimate win-win.
To bring others into this world, the United States needs to make its own commitment to the system clear. So far, America has been able to have it both ways. It is the global rule-maker but doesn't always play by the rules. And forget about standards created by others. Only three countries in the world don't use the metric system—Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States. For America to continue to lead the world, we will have to first join it.
Americans—particularly the American government—have not really understood the rise of the rest. This is one of the most thrilling stories in history. Billions of people are escaping from abject poverty. The world will be enriched and ennobled as they become consumers, producers, inventors, thinkers, dreamers, and doers. This is all happening because of American ideas and actions. For 60 years, the United States has pushed countries to open their markets, free up their politics, and embrace trade and technology. American diplomats, businessmen, and intellectuals have urged people in distant lands to be unafraid of change, to join the advanced world, to learn the secrets of our success. Yet just as they are beginning to do so, we are losing faith in such ideas. We have become suspicious of trade, openness, immigration, and investment because now it's not Americans going abroad but foreigners coming to America. Just as the world is opening up, we are closing down.
Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that by the turn of the 21st century, the United States had succeeded in its great, historical mission—globalizing the world. We don't want them to write that along the way, we forgot to globalize ourselves.
I love those last two paragraphs!
The News Service Office here at Iowa State University has issued me a challenge: use my online network to come up with some ideas for parents to cure kids' mid-summer ‘blahs.’ Specifically, what we’re looking for are ways to use technology to facilitate active learning opportunities during the summer.
Here are a few quick ideas that I had:
I’m no longer a K-12 teacher so I’m sure that many of you have more creative ideas than these. What suggestions do you have for how parents and kids can use technology to facilitate active learning this summer?
Update
A big THANKS to everyone who contributed ideas. So far we have appeared on the ISU News Service home page and the Ames (IA) Tribune editorial page. I also have been interviewed by WHO Radio and Radio Iowa. If you have further ideas, please share them as a comment below. We are getting lots of visitors!
Dr. Jim Gee notes:
If learning always operates well within the learner's resources, then all that happens is that the learner's behaviors get more and more routinized, as the learner continues to experience success by doing the same things. This is good ... for learning and practicing fluent and masterful performance ... but is not good for developing newer and higher skills. However, if learning operates outside one's resources, the learner is simply frustrated and gives up.
Good video games ... build in many opportunities for learners to operate at the outer edge of their regime of competence, thereby causing them to rethink their routinized mastery and move, within the game and themselves, to a new level. Indeed, for many learners it is these times ... when learning is most exciting and rewarding. Sadly in school, many so-called advantaged learners rarely get to operate at the edge of their regime of competence as they coast along in a curriculum that makes few real demands on them. At the same time, less advantaged learners are repeatedly asked to operate outside their regime of competence.
[Video games] build into their designs and encourage good principles of learning … that are better than those in many of our skill-and-drill, back-to-basics, test-them-until-they-drop schools.
Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. [pp. 70, 205]
In contrast, here are current teachers’ beliefs (click on graph for full report):
Advertiser
Hello,
We have a client in the e-learning sector who is interested in advertising on your blog. We find it relevant to our client and your blog to be of high quality. We are interested in buying links site-wide, homepage links, link within articles, or having you write about our client and linking to them. If you are open to doing so, we can also provide the content Please write back to me with your advertising rates and how much it will cost to sponsor a blog post on your site. Also, if you run other blogs, please send those to me too. We will be able to Paypal you immediately for these link placements.
Regards,
John
Me
Hi John,
Is $10,000 per sponsored blog post too expensive? I don't know what the going rate is these days for a sponsored post…
Advertiser
Hi Scott,
Thanks for the response. I think $10,000 for sponsoring a post is just too much. We can pay you $50 for sponsoring a post for our client.
Let me know if you are interested.
John
Me
That’s not enough. Thanks, though!
What I should have said
I appreciate your interest in my blog. However, please do me and my readers the favor of actually reading some of our blog conversations first to understand the focus of the blog and the issues that we address. If you then make me an offer that meets the needs of our community (rather than your company), I will at least give you careful consideration despite my general reluctance to accept outside advertising on the blog. Thank you.
Thank you to everyone who expressed interest in serving on the CASTLE Advisory Board. We had many, many more applicants than we possibly could take. Although having too many people who are willing to serve is a wonderful problem to have as an organization, it also meant that we had to make some extremely difficult decisions. We will do our best to try and tap into everyone’s expertise in other ways…
Below is our new advisory board. As you can see, we strove for diversity of thought, professional role, and geography. Many of the individuals below also are bloggers (which probably isn’t too surprising).
Principals
Central office administrators
Teachers
Media specialists / technology integrationists
Higher education
National, international, and other organizations
I think I may have just found the opening video for my Monday presentation to the Ames Noon Rotary.
Kudos to the Pearson Foundation Digital Arts Alliance and the Consortium for School Networking (and a hat tip to David Warlick) for a great resource!
As promised, here is my interview of Mike Vitelli, CEO of The Gaming Krib:
Happy listening!
Kudos to Dan Meyer for being named as a 2008 Leader in Learning by the cable industry! A complete list of the winners is at the Leaders in Learning web site.
[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]
My city’s public library is a wonderful place. It hosts a variety of well-attended events, has a phenomenal children’s section, and serves as a real hub for the community. But its formal communications stink.
The very first time that you have an overdue book, the initial notice that you receive says that failure to pay your fines may result in being turned over to a collection agency. Ouch. When you request a book, the notification that the book is in says that failure to pick up the book promptly will result in a $0.50 fine. Huh? If you write a letter to the public library’s director highlighting the somewhat draconian tone of its communications, you receive a letter justifying the library’s terseness (trust me on this one). So despite all of the great things that the public library does, you’re still left with a bitter taste in your mouth.
Seth Godin reminds us that every interaction with a customer / client / patron / stakeholder / visitor is a marketing interaction. It’s an opportunity for us to build or erode our brand, a chance to increase or decrease the trust and goodwill of the people with whom we are interacting.
What’s this mean for schools? Well, it means that every time a parent walks away unhappy from an encounter at school, that’s a marketing interaction. Every time a teacher has yet another boring lesson, that’s a marketing interaction. Every time a school board member puts her personal agenda ahead of what’s best for students, that’s a marketing interaction. Every time a member of the community walks through an uninviting building, that’s a marketing interaction. And every time an administrator squanders an opportunity to be a leader rather than a manager, that’s a marketing interaction.
Schools do a host of wonderful things. But they also engage in a number of individual and organizational behaviors that chip away at the trust and goodwill of their internal and external communities. We can bemoan the lack of student engagement / parent support / community involvement / referendum votes all we want, but our actions probably led to the problem(s) in the first place. Putting forth a glossy spin on the surface (We’re the best! Support us!) does no good if we’re not willing to look at our underlying practices as the marketing interactions that they are.
Many of you know that I'm asking the edublogosphere to gradually help me flesh out the Moving Forward wiki so that it can be a valuable resource to presenters and others who are trying to facilitate change in schools. For example, in April we identified a number of high-quality elementary classroom blogs.
This week I'm asking for great blogs that are of interest to special education teachers (particularly special education teachers who are blogging themselves). By great blogs, I mean the kind that you might show in a presentation to persuade others of the power and potential of blogging for teachers of students with special needs. If you know of any such blogs, please add them to the wiki!
Why does it bother me so much to see principals on this list?
Dennis Richards, a superintendent in Falmouth, Massachusetts, is trying to get the annual ASCD conference to recognize the power and the potential of the Social Web. Help him out by adding your name to the collaborators section of his proposal wiki (hint: don't pick the first blank row, choose one further down) and then passing this along. He's going to make his goal of 50; let's see if we can get the total over 100.
It'll only take you a couple of minutes. How often do you get a chance to help out a superintendent? Deadline: noon today (Eastern). Thanks!
I really wanted to like the Creating Valuable Class Web Sites article in the May 2008 issue of Learning and Leading With Technology. I really did. I believe strongly that teachers should be incorporating digital technologies into their instruction and communication with students and parents, and I know that teachers can use all of the good ideas, best practices, and resources that we can provide. But then I read the article (hat tip to Sylvia Martinez and Bud Hunt) and I was completely dismayed…
As Sylvia and Bud noted on Twitter, many of the web sites presented by the author are quite dated. Geocities and Tripod: weren’t those big in the 1990s? Netscape Composer: Seriously? FrontPage: didn’t Microsoft quit selling that a while ago? The inclusion of such tools calls into serious question the currency, and thus credibility, of the author’s expertise.
The Resources section at the end was similarly lacking. Take a look at Blog Connection. It was one of the two best blogging sites the author could recommend for K-12 educators? And EdBlogger Praxis? The site that hasn’t been updated since February 2007? At least the author linked to eMINTS when it came to wikis…
Instead of tables of outdated web resources and an irrelevant resources section, the author should have included current tools rather than those from 5–10 years ago. Some discussion of the desirability of using outside, non-district-sponsored tools also would have been nice. Instead, the article reads like it was cobbled together by someone who’s rooted in the technology of yesteryear rather than today. This was an opportunity squandered. Is this stuff what the author teaches her students? Doesn’t ISTE have a responsibility to do some checking of article content?
Learning and Leading With Technology is supposed to be helpful to educators in 2008, not 1998. And usually it fulfills that function extremely well. I hate to say this - because I’m rarely critical in public of others (unless they’re clueless leaders who should know better) – but the author and the ISTE editors didn’t do their job with this one.
Erin Reilly, Research Director for the New Media Literacies project at MIT, is looking for some New England high schools to pilot test its new Teachers’ Strategy Guide, Reading in a Participatory Culture. Read over the description of the project, check out the web site, and then contact Erin if your school is interested in participating.
FYI, Erin rocks. I met her at the 2007 Leaders in Learning Awards in Washington, DC when she still was running Zoey’s Room. Now she gets to work with Henry Jenkins! Hope some of you can help her out…
My latest article for the American Association of School Administrators is now online. Titled Blocking the Future, it’s only a page long but I’m really excited about it. Here’s an excerpt:
[S]chool district leaders have a critical choice to make: Will their schools pro-actively model and teach the safe and appropriate use of these digital tools or will they reactively block them out and leave students and families to fend for themselves? Unfortunately, many schools are choosing to do the latter. . . . I can think of no better way to highlight organizational unimportance than to block out the tools that are transforming the rest of society. Schools whose default stance is to prohibit rather than enable might as well plant a sign in front of their buildings that says, “Irrelevant to children’s futures.”
I’ve also made a handy SnipURL:
Hopefully this will be a useful reading for your administrators and teachers. Feel free to distribute liberally!
Here are some research findings for you…
Smart people leave teaching?
Of the teachers who had high college entrance exam scores, almost a fourth of them leave the profession within a decade. In contrast, only about 11% of the individuals with low scores leave the teaching profession within 10 years. Similarly, more than a third of the teachers with low college entrance exam scores are still teaching a decade after they started, while only 15% of the teachers with high scores are still teaching ten years after they began (Anderson & Carroll, 2008; see also Guarino, Santibanez, & Daley (2006), who note similar results for university selectiveness and certification exam scores). In other words, the percentage of teachers with lower academic ability increases in schools over time. The brightest go elsewhere.
Teacher smarts matter?
Discuss among yourselves
Let’s assume that, generally speaking, these studies are correct: 1) smart people are less likely to stay in teaching (thus resulting in a concentration of teachers with lower academic ability), and 2) the academic ability of teachers impacts student learning outcomes. Now what?
References
[Since CoComment won’t play nice, here’s my response to Clay Burell’s post]
When I started blogging in August 2006, I was feeling very down about the idea of writing. The range of acceptability of style and form in academic writing is pretty narrow. The belief of my peers that publication in peer-reviewed journals was the only writing that was worthwhile also was very constraining, particularly since the educators that I'm trying to reach don't read those publications. I was struggling to find meaning and value in what I was supposed to be writing.
Blogging cured me of my writing blahs. It provided me with an outlet that fits me like a glove, helped me discover my writing voice, and made me realize that I LOVE to write - indeed, maybe LIVE to write - if given the proper medium. A few months of blogging also gave me the courage to say:
This is who I am. This is what I'm all about. I'm a practitioner-oriented professor trying to facilitate change in schools. I'm a professor who thinks that there is unbelievable power in the ‘Social Web’ and I am going to try to figure it out, regardless of what others think. If U. Minnesota won't reward that, it's time to find a place that will. And the hell with those who think I'm moving down the institutional pecking order. What matters is job/life satisfaction and I'm going to find it.
So it turns out that I am a writer after all. I just didn't know it because I had been trying to follow someone else's writing paradigm, one that didn't fit me very well. I'm lucky that my new university, Iowa State, finds value in what I do. And I'm lucky to live in a time when these self-publication tools are so readily available. 'Cause I'm going to milk them for all they're worth.
My latest roundup of links and tools…
I read blocked blogs
Are you up to the challenge?
Why K-12 educators shake their heads at academia
No hand-held electronics in front of the kids!
I was incredulous to read ... the decision by the London Catholic School Board in Ontario banning hand held electronic devices in schools. . . . Even more bizarrely ... school board employees are only allowed to use these devices "in areas from which students are excluded." Taken to its logical extent then this includes staff also being unable to use digital cameras to record student work or projects, create and listen to podcasts and so on.
– Gareth Long
Like Alfie Kohn, Dan Meyer forces us to rethink / justify
New tools I’m finding quite useful
The impetus is on us, not them
Help a teacher develop an integrated lesson [that] ... focuses on a local issue of real importance, in which they, their families, and/or others in their community have a genuine stake and interest. If their learning is situated in that type of context, I think you’ll find the impact of their learning experiences will be far greater, and many more of them will learn digital literacy skills alongside traditional literacy skills. Teaching in a problem-based learning environment is a lot more work than simply lecturing and delivering content to students, but it is the type of learning environment our students need to remain engaged in school work. Too many kids today are BORED by school. As the adults running our schools, it is our responsibility to remedy this situation.
– Wesley Fryer
A couple of gems from Clay Burell…
And a couple more from Gerald Bracey
We are a little egocentric, aren’t we?
And, finally, a reminder from John Pederson
One year ago: Well, what's your answer? and Principal blogging not allowed
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