Teaching and Professional Development

For science teacher Kathleen Chesmel's students at New Egypt High School, homework rarely means hours spent poring over textbooks or hounding parents for problem-solving help.

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Looking for ideas on how to integrate classroom technology with no money? Want some advice? This article is for you!

Education technologies hold promise for personalized learning and for building basic skills, but a fundamental obstacle remains: the effectiveness of learning technologies is rarely known.

There is a perception about innovation that is somewhat demeaning to teachers. It's the idea that Daniel Pink or Sir Ken Robinson or Robert Marzano are the ones who can tell us how schools need to change. It's the idea that teachers just need more professional development, more coaching and more resources. It's easy to see this perception in the corporate education reformers. Rhee and Duncan praise teachers while also pushing for measures that reduce professional autonomy and place reform at the mantel of experts who have never spent any time in an actual classroom.  However, I noticed a similar issue in reading some of the #educon tweets and in engaging with a debate about "blowing up the system" on Twitter this last Saturday morning. It's the idea that maybe teachers don't matter. Maybe we need experts from the outside to push reform. Maybe what's stifling teachers is a lack of technological and pedagogical expertise.

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Sharon Boller, President of Bottom-Line Performance, has authored a new white paper: “Learning Trends, Technologies and Opportunities.” Using both quantitative research and anecdotal evidence from our work with Fortune 500 clients, Sharon uncovers both what the learning and development field currently looks like AND where is it headed in the next 12 – 18 months.

 

 

Learn how to teach your kids solve kids math problems using the Model Method widely used in Singapore Math by Singaporean Teachers, Tutors, Parents.

Opting out is taking off. Parents, teachers, and now even entire state legislatures are saying they’ve had enough with high-stakes-testing and the damage it’s doing to education. I sat in a room with teachers here in Pittsburgh this week who told me that ten years ago they would have given one standardized test a year; now they are spending weeks upon weeks on test prep and test administration. But their students aren’t learning more. If anything they are learning less, while the high-stakes attached to the tests have radically changed what education looks like.

This radical shift was really brought home for me this week reading about Alan C. Jones, a former principal and teacher educator in Illinois, who accompanied his daughter in the search for a good public school for his grandson. After decades working in education, he reports that he was appalled at what high-stakes-testing had done to those schools he visited:

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If you ask a student what makes him or her successful in school, you probably won’t hear about some fantastic new book or video lecture series. Most likely you will hear something like, “It was all Mr. Jones. He just never gave up on me.”

What students take away from a successful education usually centers on a personal connection with a teacher who instilled passion and inspiration for their subject. It’s difficult to measure success, and in the world of academia, educators are continually re-evaluating how to quantify learning. But the first and most important question to ask is:

Are teachers reaching their students?

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There is an important difference between games that teach a learner how to do something and games that test what a learner already knows. Too often those two types of games are confused and an instructional designer or other person places the wrong type of game into the curriculum. Testing Games are games where the learner already needs to know the information to be successful. The focus of the game is not to apply knowledge but rather to recall knowledge. Good examples of testing games are Trivia games