How useful are the views of public school students about their teachers?

Quite useful, according to preliminary results released on Friday from a $45 million research project that is intended to find new ways of distinguishing good teachers from bad.

Teachers whose students described them as skillful at maintaining classroom order, at focusing their instruction and at helping their charges learn from their mistakes are often the same teachers whose students learn the most in the course of a year, as measured by gains on standardized test scores, according to a progress report on the research.

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The latest issue of The International Journal of Learning includes:

• A Meta-Analysis of Excessive Assessment Practices in Education: Negotiating the Complexity and Understanding the Need for Change by Sherri Franklin-Guy.
• Pedagogical Exchange for Professional Development: Reflections on how Collaboration has Inspired and Empowered a Group of Early Years Educators to Find New Ways of Working to Improve Learning and Teaching by Heather Davies and Claire Head.
• A Blended Knowledge Sharing Model Using AIC Approach to Enhance Building Shared Vision Skills of Young FDA Leaders by Patcharavadee Sriboonruang, Sugree Rodpothong and Onjaree Natakuatoong.
• “It’s a Whole New Fun Different Way to Learn.” Students’ Perceptions of Learning with an Electronic Simulation: Selected Results from Three Case Studies in an Australian, an American and a Swiss Middle School by Anika Struppert.
• Responsive Literacy Instruction for at Risk Students: A Path to Critical Thinking by Nancy A. Chicola and Maria Ceprano.
• The Study on Competency of Graduating Students Being Major in Graphic Design by Sheng-Fa Hsieh, Shing-Sheng Guan and Chia-Ling Wu.
• A Narrative Analysis of Teachers’ Beliefs about Chinese Language Curriculum Reform by Yanyan Zhang.
• Using Citizenship Education, Adolescent Literature, and Service Learning to Promote Social Justice by Leisa Martin and Lynn Smolen.
• Intercultural Language Experience at a Liberal Arts University by Lorie Cook-Benjamin.
• Using Computational Fluid Dynamics to Introduce Critical Thinking and Creativity in an Undergraduate Engineering Course by Wael Mokhtar.
• Aesthetics in Reading: Can Text and Image Layout Help or Hinder Reading? by Stella Pooi Keng Ong.
• Science Teacher Effectiveness as a Condition for Successful Science Education in Africa: A Focus on Kenya by Samuel Ouma Oyoo.
• International Testing: Measuring Global Standards or Reinforcing Inequalities by Marilyn Kell and Peter Kell.

Michael R. Bloomberg, in his successful bid to become mayor, sold himself as an expert manager, a businessman who had made a fortune in private industry. He has now named Cathleen P. Black, a magazine executive, to be the next chancellor of New York City’s public schools. Why?

“Cathie Black is a superstar manager who has succeeded spectacularly in the private sector,” Mayor Bloomberg said this month. “She is brilliant, she is innovative, she is driven — and there is virtually nobody who knows more about the needs of the 21st-century work force for which we need to prepare our kids.”

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This review examines the Heartland Institute’s report ranking states on student achievement, education expenditures, and adherence to learning standards, as well as a ranking based on an average of the first three. The rankings are based on indices created by the report’s authors, and the report highlights the top- and lowest-performing states for each of the indices. The report assigns letter grades to each of the states (plus DC), with a forced distribution: 10 states are assigned A’s, B’s, C’s, and D’s, and 11 states must get F’s. The report explains how the indices were devised but does not cite any research or provide rationales to support the methodological approach used in their creation.

The puzzles look easy, and mostly they are. Given three words — “trip,” “house” and “goal,” for example — find a fourth that will complete a compound word with each. A minute or so of mental trolling (housekeeper, goalkeeper, trip?) is all it usually takes.

But who wants to troll?

Let lightning strike. Let the clues suddenly coalesce in the brain — “field!” — as they do so often for young children solving a riddle. As they must have done, for that matter, in the minds of those early humans who outfoxed nature well before the advent of deduction, abstraction or SAT prep courses. Puzzle-solving is such an ancient, universal practice, scholars say, precisely because it depends on creative insight, on the primitive spark that ignited the first campfires.

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Recently published in The International Journal of Learning:

• Leveraging Audience Response Systems for Programmatic Evaluation in Extension Education by Ben Spong and Sarah Selmer.
• Assessing and Developing Academic Literacy in First Year Health Undergraduates by Sandra Sacre and Robyn Nash.
• Contribution of Education to Enhancing Unity: Malaysian Experience by Zaharah Hassan, Fazilah Idris, Noor Aziah Mohd Awal, Azizah Ya’acob and Mansor Mohd Noor.
• Between Two Evils: Stand and Difficulties of Teachers Integrating Pupils with Special Needs in their Classes by Anat Raviv.
• Inventive Thinking Skills in Science: A Comparative Study between Students in Malaysia and Brunei by Maria Abdullah and Kamisah Osman.
• Developing Pedagogies for Teaching about Climate Change by Athena Vongalis-Macrow.
• Enhancing Pedagogical Roles of ESL/EFL Native and Non-Native Teachers through Team Teaching: How to Make this ‘International Partnership’ Successful by Sun Hee Jang, Boi Hoang Nguyen and Yang Yang.
• Parental Involvement in School to Improve Academic Achievement: Primary Teachers’ Views by Fatin Aliana Mohd Radzi, Mohd Noorazam Abd Razak and Nor Hashima Mohd Sukor.
• Care-based and Justice-based Morality in Kindergarten by Mun Wong.
• Comparing Frequencies of Group/Pair Work and Teachers’ Instructions in Primary English and Mathematics Classrooms by Soe Marlar Lwin and Christine Goh.
• The Study of Teaching Beliefs Reflected on Teaching Behavior: Focusing on Elementary School Teachers by Hsi-Chi Hsiao and Su-Ling Yang.
• A Study of Online Self-Regulated Learning and its Effect on Adult Literacy in the PRC by Aliana Man Wai Leong and Yan Gao.

Framing My Name: Extending Educational Boundaries

Framing my name: extending educational boundaries addresses issues of name and the naming process and its impact on higher education pedagogy. In bringing together the perspectives of the authors, the book shows how students’ names are an agency of their learning. The manner in which names are articulated impacts on how students relate to learning. The process of naming involves an ontology that is related to students’ histories, their culture, their place and position within a social matrix of group and community. For educators, this means undergoing a scaffolding process of learning the background to names and naming processes and then applying this knowledge to an understanding of students.

‘This book explores a wide and rich array of cultural stories and meanings, of hybrid forms and possibilities, or tradition and encounter in names and naming. It has great practical value and is a pedagogical investment of its own, but a possibly greater virtue is its ability to look at boundaries and ask about their role, to push beyond them but acknowledge their function and enduring presence, to offer ideas about how identity and place, names and roles are constructed and how these function.

In several chapters, we encounter students and teachers negotiating their local modus operandi based on cultural sensitivity and draw the conclusion of the key importance of an advance awareness of the need to think more seriously and systematically about personal names. In Margaret Kumar’s discussion of names, we see how names and their multiple meanings is an instalment in the very process of global education itself, in which the expectations of teachers, lecturers and administrators about who they will be teaching and ‘servicing’, have been scrambled. The norm is less and less a norm. The editors, bring the perspectives of educators, concerned with effectiveness in education (‘good’ teaching) but also good effects from education (‘just’ teaching) and this double element pervades the ethical stance that the volume exhibits. This is one of its most ennobling characteristics.’

Professor Joseph Lo Bianco, Foreword to Framing my name: extending educational boundaries.

Justin Snider of The Hechinger Report sat down today with Dr. Pasi Sahlberg, Director General of the Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation in Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture. An edited version of their conversation follows.

Sahlberg, who has trained teachers, coached schools and advised policymakers in more than 40 countries, is also a former Washington-based World Bank education specialist. Earlier this week, Finland was once again among the top-scoring nations on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an exam given to 15-year-olds around the world. U.S. students were in the middle of the pack for science and literacy but below average in mathematics.

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This policy brief describes the growth of schoolhouse advertising and marketing activities in the last few decades, assesses the harms associated with commercial activities in schools, and provides advocates, policymakers, and educators with a policy framework and model legislative language designed to protect children and the integrity of education programs from advertising and marketing in schools.