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From The Huffington Post
Stephen Colbert interviews a Columbia professor regarding the banning of certain textbooks:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| I’s on Edjukashun – Texas School Board | ||||
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Monthly Archive for March, 2010
Page 2 of 2
From Sarah Firisen in 3 Quarks Daily
The photo to the right is of our family dog, Treetree (we stupidly allowed a 2 year old to name her and Treetree is what we ended up with.) She’s a yellow Labrador Retriever, a breed notoriously easy to train. Dog motivation, and particularly Lab motivation is pretty simple: they want to please their owners and extra food is always welcome, and so a carrot and stick approach works very well. They do a good job, they get a treat, they do a bad job and they are scolded. Despite the fact that Treetree is definitely not the smartest dog in the world, and that we were not the most consistent and industrious dog trainers ever, she’s a well trained dog; the carrot and stick approach of “if-then” turns out to be a good way to train a dog, but is it how we should be educating our children?
From Russell Shorto, in The New York Times
Last month, a week before the Senate seat of the liberal icon Edward M. Kennedy fell into Republican hands, his legacy suffered another blow that was perhaps just as damaging, if less noticed. It happened during what has become an annual spectacle in the culture wars.
Over two days, more than a hundred people — Christians, Jews, housewives, naval officers, professors; people outfitted in everything from business suits to military fatigues to turbans to baseball caps — streamed through the halls of the William B. Travis Building in Austin, Tex., waiting for a chance to stand before the semicircle of 15 high-backed chairs whose occupants made up the Texas State Board of Education. Each petitioner had three minutes to say his or her piece.
From Elizabeth Green in the New York Times Magazine:
ON A WINTER DAY five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.
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But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. When Bill Gates announced recently that his foundation was investing millions in a project to improve teaching quality in the United States, he added a rueful caveat. “Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn’t have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,” Gates said. “I’m personally very curious.”
When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once.
It was the tiniest decision, but what was teaching if not a series of bite-size moves just like that?
Innovative Strategies to Develop Better Schools by Prakash Singh is now available from The Learner imprint.
Better schools prepare better learners! Can anyone dispute this? Hence, innovative strategies in education are presented in this book with the primary purpose of developing better schools. Key areas covered in this book are:
- Organisational effectiveness
- Emotional intelligence
- Collegial leadership
- Fear of failure in education: Tobephobia
- Media-based learning
- Gifted learners
- High risk learners
- Self-regulated learning.
Novel strategies are presented that educators can employ to focus on and to improve practice. The issues discussed in this book are therefore typical issues that educators are faced with daily in their schools. It equips them with useful information to cope with the challenges of being teachers. Also, Innovative Strategies to Develop Better Schools gives educators the opportunity to introspect critically their professional integrity and status. Ultimately, no matter how much we do in our schools, our learners must be the beneficiaries of quality educational outcomes.