Archive for the ‘
student success ’ Category
In reflecting on my practicum experience at the high school level, the one thing that stuck with me above all else did not involve grading, lesson plans, or even classroom management. It was something that went beyond the curriculum and beyond the standards. It was something that even in my relatively brief teaching career will forever change my own perception of myself as an educator. It was a connection. A connection between a teacher and his students, which, in turn, fostered a similar connection between the teacher and his students’ parents—a mutual respect that blossomed through the desire to go above and beyond.
As I sat in the classroom, anxiously awaiting my opportunity to sit-in on my first parent-teacher conference, a myriad of thoughts swirled through my mind. What if they ask me how their son is doing in class? “Why is my daughter scoring so low on your quizzes, and what are you going to do about it?” or “my Johnny is not being challenged in your class.” Granted, I was only observing, but what if? In reality, this was most likely going to be a fairly dull two hours with discussions about absences, missing assignments, and low test scores. I was sure there would also be highlights about aced quizzes, perfect attendance, and “what a joy Lucy is to have in class.”
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Category:
parent involvement, student achievement, student success, teacher appreciation, teacher effectiveness, teaching strategies |
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Tags: Joshua Tabshy, parent teacher conferences
Here it comes…the first day of school! Walking through the doors, you can feel the exhilarating mixture of excitement and nervousness in the air. Kids will be meeting new teachers, seeing old friends, and showing off their stylin’ new clothes. It’s fantastic fun for some, but for students with high geographic mobility, the prospect of yet another new school, filled with unfamiliar faces isn’t exciting—it’s scary. How can teachers help these kids feel welcome, and make their transition into another new environment a little easier?
Students with high geographic mobility are those who have attended many schools during their K-12 years due to frequent moves. For some families, moving more than once in the course of a single school year is common. Usually these moves are associated with employment, housing, or relationship problems, and can be a contributing factor in low academic achievement (http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/student-mobility/).
Every child is different, and deals with change in his or her own way. I spoke with several friends who moved around a lot, attending as many as 11 schools during their K-12 years. They were all affected differently.
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Category:
student achievement, student success, teaching strategies |
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Tags: classroom tactics, new students, student achievement, student engagement, student mobility, teaching strategies
I may be revealing how much television I watch, but those K12.com Oregon Virtual Academy commercials are everywhere these days. Issues of school choice aside, their refrain of praises for online learning has me thinking more and more lately about the role of technology in education. How will new technologies help students’ learning? How will digital tools change the classroom? Will all these developments help create critical thinkers and global entrepreneurs (with “21st century skills”), or will they disconnect people from each other and create a generation of frenzied consumers of the overwhelming digital stream of information?
In our current ChalkBloggers poll, not one person has selected “Utilizing new technologies” as the most important element of classroom instruction. That’s a relief to me. I would never want a teacher to sacrifice real interactions (like providing constructive feedback and creating a positive and open learning environment, the two top answers) to let a computer do it for them. No one wants robotic teaching.
But certainly, lessons can be enhanced with new digital resources—and more and more, this and future generations of technology-steeped children will need to be reached with constructive interactive tools in the classroom. No one can completely shut off to new technologies and risk being left behind. The trick is finding a balance and carefullychoosing the most effective tools that will enrich, not distract from, student learning.
But how to sort through the myriad options that seem to be growing and changing even faster everyday? It seems like a full-time job just to keep up. But I’ve found a few new online resources (of course) that look to do the work for you.
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Category:
education technology, innovation, student achievement, student success, teaching strategies |
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Tags: classroom tactics, innovation, resources, student achievement, student engagement, teaching strategies, technology
The summer weather has finally arrived in Oregon and summer vacation is in full swing. Some kids are camping, some are at summer camp. Many teachers are taking a much-needed break, while others are enrolled in summer courses.
Summer vacation has been a tradition in the United States since the mid-19th century, but as the students of the United States fall behind in reading, math and science, the trend towards year-round education is gaining momentum. Is it possible that summer vacation is a tradition that is doing more harm than good for our children? Could year-round school be the key to improving our struggling public education system?
Public schools in the United States haven’t always had a long summer vacation; in fact, in the 1800s different areas of our country had different school schedules. In the city schools were open as many as 48 weeks a year while rural areas had a summer and winter term for school and a fall and spring break allowing children to help with planting and harvesting on the family farm. In the 1840s, popular educational reformers like Horace Mann proposed a blending of the two schedules citing the belief that year-round school was over-stimulating to children’s minds, but that 2 semesters wasn’t enough. And so it was. The “traditional” calendar was born: a 9 month school year with a long summer break. (Source)
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Category:
extended learning, funding, school year, student success |
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Tags: education statistics, Oregon schools, professional development for teachers, research, school funding, summer learning loss, year-round education
There are some very inspirational leaders in the education profession. These are the people who seem to have the capacity to view the big picture and articulate so clearly what they see and hear. Linda Nathan, headmaster of Boston Arts Academy, author, and Harvard instructor in democratic schools, is such a leader.
Linda came to Oregon in May as the keynote speaker at the Oregon Small Schools Leadership Institute in Ashland. The theme of the one day Institute, led by E3 Small Schools Director Kathy Campobasso, was “moving forward.” Linda spoke with rich and vivid examples on the importance of leadership with a strong and clear vision and about the complexities of sustaining the work of personalizing education through the power of small. Principals, teacher leaders, teachers, superintendents, and board members from 22 small high schools participated in a variety of break-out sessions. They shared outstanding practices that are happening in their schools and celebrated the positive results.
Students from southern Oregon small schools presented a panel on their small high school experiences. The concluding forum was presented by Duncan Wyse, Executive Director of E3, Barbara Gibbs of Meyer Memorial Trust, and Linda Nathan on the importance and challenges of moving forward with positive school change on the state and national level. All were inspirational!
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Category:
small schools, student achievement, student success |
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Tags: class size, collaborative culture, innovation, inspiration, Oregon schools, student achievement
Story #1: I teach International Relations at West Linn High, a course juniors and seniors can take to fulfill a social studies requirement. Part way through the spring semester, I was discouraged to realize that over half my 100 IR students were missing assignments. Considering we’d averaged only one homework assignment per week, and a couple of the assignments were quite easy, I was troubled. It is my goal only to assign homework I believe will benefit students, and when they don’t complete homework it hampers their ability to succeed.
So with complete parental and administrative support, I sprang a surprise on students: If you do not complete every assignment, you will not pass this class. Even if you’re earning a passing grade, if you have even one missing assignment, I will enter “incomplete” in the gradebook and you will not receive a credit. Some were shocked, realizing that no credit could mean not graduating.
I was nervous about the new policy. I wondered whether all students would pull through, and if they didn’t, if I’d be willing to be the one obstacle that stood between them and graduation. I wondered whether at crunch time a parent would challenge the policy.
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Category:
parent involvement, student achievement, student success, teacher effectiveness, teaching strategies |
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Tags: at risk students, reflection, student achievement, student engagement, teacher effectiveness, teaching strategies
Here’s my bottom line: The most important task of a school leader is to embrace the challenge of having a clear and shared vision of equitable outcomes for all students. It is the democratic principle of fairness upon which our country is founded and the basis for truly changing the achievement gaps that now prevail.
With the recent news that only 66% of Oregon students graduate high school, it’s clear that this vision does not “just happen.” It has to be owned and shared by the whole school community. It must be intentional, planned, implemented and supported to be sustainable. It must be evident every day, every week and every month in every classroom. All students, teachers and parents need to know and own a common vision of outcomes at their school. What must each student know and be able to do when he/she graduates? When this is clear and held dear, there is a true school spirit.
All students come from somewhere special, each with different backgrounds, different experiences and different circumstances. The whole of their differences is the beautiful mosaic of school. And when they come through the school doors, they are in a place where equity can happen. But there must be a roadmap for success for each student in each classroom across these differences.
Teachers must lead the way for the students. They must know their students well, understanding them across all their differences. They must ask the question: What does it take for a student to enter a school at one level of achievement, move forward, and then graduate with the highest potential achievement? That’s the daily challenge of teaching, at every level.
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Category:
education achievement gap, equity, student achievement, student success, teacher effectiveness, teaching strategies |
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Tags: achievement gap, at risk students, classroom tactics, creativity, education reform, inspiration, learning styles, reflection, student achievement, student engagement, teacher effectiveness, teaching strategies
One of the questions I posed last week to my fourth graders was, “If I’m a carnivore, do I need plants?” Some said yes and some no.
I spend a good deal of time teaching kids how to convince with facts and polite discussion. They sit in teams, put heads together and work out their issues. The yes people proved their point to the no people. We don’t always have smooth discussions and feelings sometimes get hurt. We work on it—a lot. Kids learn that they can stand down from an initial idea when faced with proof and not lose face. Some of the phrases we use are “That’s a good idea, but have you thought about…”
Yes, civility and debate need to be explicitly taught as does critical thinking.
When one kid declared that, “We are all in this together,” after our food web discussion, it made me think of the remarks that I often hear about educational issues. One argument in particular strikes me time and again: the one about how public education generates no money so it should bear the brunt of the economic crisis while corporations should have a lesser tax burden because they drive the economy. Obviously, these people have not reflected on the interdependence of the public and private sector, just as some of my students at first didn’t see the connection between individual members of a food web.
I wonder if across our nation, we are reaping the harvest of a generation that wasn’t asked to dig deeply to find connections. The inability to debate civilly quite possibly stems from inadequate training in school, the result of sitting in rows and competitively trying to get the highest score on tests that have no gray areas. Our curricula have always tended to stress superficial knowledge of lots of subjects at the expense of in-depth collaborative analysis.
The good news is that there is a move to develop an American public that is more thoughtful. Educators at all levels currently use “larger questions” to teach higher level thinking through content. Just last week we debated whether Capt. Meriwether Lewis was a good leader, which prompted a search for direct evidence. And it’s not just me—it’s happening in many classrooms. A current national push for high school graduation requirements to include community service will develop a generation that also looks beyond themselves.
In Oregon, we have developed testing that now necessitates that kids think critically. In fourth grade, students are asked to write a multi-paragraph paper in order to pass the writing test. Writing takes considerable logical thinking to organize and stamina to produce. New this year in elementary school math, we now have three tested areas where kids need to show a truly deep understanding of the topic. Gone are the days when success on standardized tests solely involved memorizing the algorithm to answer a computation problem.
While today people may look exclusively at test scores and think that public schools are failing, many of us are thinking more deeply about what defines success in our schools. We are aiming for higher standards. We work to develop a generation of superior thinkers who will debate logically and civilly, and who will in turn respect the contributions of all individuals in our society.
Category:
education reform, student achievement, student success, teacher effectiveness, teaching strategies |
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Tags: classroom tactics, collaborative culture, creativity, education reform, inspiration, reflection, student achievement, student engagement, teaching strategies
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
- Langston Hughes
The Senate has defeated the “Dream Act” (The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act). This legislation offers a path to citizenship for children who arrived in the United States illegally as minors (under 15 years old). One of those paths is through completing a college degree. A bipartisan team of senators has sponsored this legislation since 2001; the most recent iteration tried to address the concerns of tuition costs and the possible domino effect of citizen sponsorship. In fact, despite the cries from opponents, if you read the actual parameters of the bill, you may be surprised to learn how really difficult it would be – even with the legislation – to become a citizen.
While both sides in the dispute over passage used social justice language and/or financial issues to justify their votes, I would like to add another argument in favor of the bill: developing our infrastructure. We don’t always think of education as an infrastructure issue. We cannot see the physical results like we see a bridge or a highway or repair of a school building. People are not outside schools in their orange vests or hard hats reminding us of “our tax dollars at work.” Yet teachers and other educators work to create and build skills and knowledge that are necessary for people to function successfully in our complex and interdependent system. To deny access to that system seems equally as near-sighted as not repairing bridges or letting school roofs leak. Instead of car drivers falling to their deaths or water damage destroying gym floors, we will have a group of people unable to contribute their full talents within our society. Just as lack of maintenance on physical infrastructures often leads to more expensive work, lack of allowance for continued education can lead to more expensive services later on.
These children, educated in our K-12 schools, are not going away. But they can go underground and found an alternative system. I lived in South Africa for a year and saw what happened when a society decided not to educate a majority of its population. Those uneducated people did not disappear. When they were barred from using certain roads, they created their own roads. When they were barred from stores, they created their own outdoor malls. When they could not afford housing, they built subdivisions out of cardboard and tin. They did not, however, build schools. In their battle merely to survive, schools were a luxury.
While I do not equate this situation with South African apartheid, I learned during that year that people are resilient and will use any means to survive. And often just surviving creates embitterment. We want more for all of our children than survival; we want their talents to flourish – both for their own fulfillment but also for our society’s continued growth. Instead of “drying up” or “festering” or even “exploding,” we want children who join our society and add their gifts to it.
Delaying or denying that opportunity is like delayed maintenance on our homes – plumbing stops working, the structure looks run-down, weeds sprout up in our lawns or through the cracked sidewalks, our property value goes down, neighbors start isolating us. Delaying/denying those children who are willing to work through college to gain citizenship appears to me to be like posting a “condemned for demolition” sign on our future.
Category:
education achievement gap, education reform, student success |
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Tags: activism, at risk students, student achievement, teacher frustration
Traditionally, grades have been interpreted as C means average, B means above average, A means excelling, D means below average, and F means failing. Yet no student of mine in fourteen years of teaching believes this. My students view B as average, A as above average, C as below average and D/F as failing.
Furthermore, I’m unsure whether most students know what it means to excel. Most are accustomed to earning As for simply following instructions. It’s not uncommon for a student to ask me why an essay was scored a B, when they listed all the requested information. I’ll reply yes, you listed the information, but you didn’t explain the information, support the information, demonstrate that you truly understand the information. In other words, you met the minimum criteria, but you didn’t surpass them. Often I receive a blank stare in response.
It seems that our students are receiving increasingly better grades, and not necessarily working harder or smarter to earn them. A 2005 study by the organization that administers the ACT test concluded, after analyzing the GPAs and ACT test scores of 800,000 students per year over 13 years, that grades had inflated over 12% over that time period, meaning a student that scored a 20 on the ACT in 2003 had a 12% higher GPA than a student that scored a 20 on the ACT in 1991.
If grade inflation exists, if we instructors are assigning students ever higher grades, then we may be doing them a disservice. They may be learning that top marks are not hard to come by, and that’s certainly not going to motivate them to become the next great innovators and problem solvers our world needs.
I’m not suggesting teachers simply need to grade students harder. In truth, I wish we didn’t have to “grade” students at all. I wish, instead, that we could simply provide students and their families meaningful qualitative information and data to monitor and promote learning and growth. But as long as we do have grades — as long as colleges and communities look to grades, regrettably, as the sole barometers of student achievement — then we owe it to students to hold them accountable to solid standards and evaluate their work accordingly, and resist pressure from students, parents and administrations to grant favorable grades. That means when a student and/or parent asks for extra credit assignments at the end of a semester for the sole purpose of boosting scores, we should reply no, and let scores reflect actual performance.
Category:
education reform, student success, teaching strategies |
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Tags: classroom tactics, education reform, student achievement, test critera
