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?

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Innovative Strategies to Develop Better Schools

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.

Cathryn Teasley was a Plenary Speaker at the 2009 Conference.

Cathryn Teasley is Adjunct Professor of Curriculum, Instruction and School Organization at the University of A Coruña, Spain. Her work is focused on cross-cultural justice through education, and is reflected in publications such as Transnational perspectives in culture, policy, and education (Peter Lang, 2008), which she co-edited with Cameron McCarthy.

Cathryn Teasley’s paper  Postcolonial Learning in Neocolonial Times has been published as part of The International Journal of Learning.

Abstract: By critically examining four broad dimensions of learning through the postcolonial lens, the aim with this study is to promote alternatives to today’s neoliberal variant on the technical-rational imaginary for learning. Such alternatives are meant to help learners of all ages, origins, and conditions, but especially those belonging to identity groups who regularly experience one or more forms of discrimination, inequality, and injustice, to identify neocolonial cultural and economic dynamics so that they might create a cross-cultural common ground from which to resist such oppression, as a means of empowering and perhaps even emancipating themselves from its damaging effects.

In the education portion of the State of the Union speech, Obama emphasized incentivizing success and reaffirmed his committment to community colleges.  He also outlined a number of financial aid reforms, including a $10,000 tax credit and limits on the percentage of a worker’s income that must go towards repaying students loans.  He set a goal of renewing ESEA, but some experts are skeptical that it can be accomplished this year given the amount of discord NCLB has generated.

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Always stunk at video games? Perhaps you’ve been cursed with a small striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning and memory. Researchers have found that college students with relatively large striatums learned how to play a challenging video game faster than their small-striatum peers. Large-striatum individuals were also better at shifting priorities from, say, shooting a target to outrunning an enemy–abilities that could translate to the real world.

The game isn’t exactly Halo or Assassin’s Creed. Instead, Space Fortress looks a lot like the very first arcade games, with geometric shapes subbing for spaceships and buildings. “The graphics stink,” admits Arthur Kramer, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who designed the game in the early 1980s. Gameplay is fairly complex, however: Players must shoot down a fortress with their ship while avoiding enemies, the bad guys look a lot like the good guys, and the ship has no brakes.

Over the years, researchers have used the game to study memory, motor control, and learning speed. The U.S. Air Force and the Israeli air force have even changed their training regimens based on how cadets fared as players. Recent studies have suggested that players appear to heavily utilize their striatum during gameplay. So Kramer and Kirk Erickson, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, decided to investigate whether the size of the striatum alone might be responsible for these abilities.

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Dr. Denise Newfield’s paper, Pippa’s Song: Multimodality and Pedagogic Praxis, commemorates the contribution of Pippa Stein, professor of language education at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg from 1981 to 2008.

Professor Stein was a much beloved and respected teacher, academic and researcher, a founder member of the Africa Research Network, a member of the international advisory committee of the Learning Conference, and of the editorial boards of numerous academic journals. Her untimely death in August 2008 is mourned by the international academic community.

It is my purpose today to pay tribute to her work in multimodal pedagogies and in democratic education by providing a critical assessment of it.

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It is one of the simplest ideas in American education—and one of the most confounding: Elected officials and educators have been talking about establishing national, or common, academic standards for at least a half-century.

On its face, the logic of that goal seems incontrovertible.

Why should students in one state be introduced to a topic such as fractions as 1st graders, to cite a common example, when their peers in other states won’t cover that mathematics topic until later? More broadly, why does the United States—a mobile society in a globally competitive era—maintain an education system that tests students, trains teachers, and churns out textbooks and classroom materials based on the myriad and often idiosyncratic demands of different states?

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Outdated materials and obsolete techniques characterise Pakistan’s school system. The prescription is a complete overhaul.

In accordance with a traditional understanding that continues to be widely followed in our region by many educationists, the process of learning in Southasia today is still largely by rote. As such, there is little or no understanding on the part of most students of what exactly they are studying, nor why. It is critical to realise, however, that education in the 21st century is far more demanding and competitive than it was in the past, due to the vast and growing knowledge base, developments in technology and an increasingly globalised perspective. It is imperative, then, to make students into active rather than passive learners to deal with this changing context – but this is a lesson that many in Southasia, and particularly in Pakistan, have yet to appreciate.

Around the world, the idea of ‘quality’ education has itself been forced to evolve in recent years, in three particular ways. First, in terms of the education process itself, students must be taught how to relate their learning to their day-to-day lives, with a focus on how to learn rather than depending solely on teachers and textbooks. Second, the goal of quality education has also changed, with an eye to enabling students to perform well academically and socially, and to become thinking, caring and tolerant global citizens. The third aspect is facilitating learners not only to perform well academically, but also to groom them to think for themselves. In short, we hope that they will be adaptive, mature and tolerant; and to respect ideological, cultural and religious diversity. Indeed, such skills – quite removed from the central tenets of the traditional curricula in this region’s countries – have become important for a student’s very survival in the globalised world. Quality education assumes the pivotal role of trained teachers who have a solid knowledge base, and have control over what to teach and how to teach it. The teachers themselves, therefore, need to be allowed to develop the expertise and self-confidence to show students the path to independent thinking and learning – and without feeling threatened themselves.

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