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Selected quotes from full post: * "NCTQ's claims of objectivity are false. As Diane Ravitch revealed last year, NCTQ was started by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation "as a new entity to promote alternative certification and to break the power of the hated ed schools," although NCTQ claims it is no longer affiliated with its founders. Despite the facts showing otherwise, NCTQ believes competition is the best bet for improving teacher preparation."
* "Consistent with its stance on similar professional issues, NCTQ supports the Growing Education Achievement Training Academies for Teachers and Principals (GREAT) Act. Although research and effective practices show that comprehensive preparation in content-specific pedagogical strategies, teaching diverse learners, and rigorous clinical experiences are essential to developing effective new teachers, the GREAT Act would require none of these features and, in fact, would lower standards for funded providers."
* "This review is based on a review of documents with such inconsistent participation and fragmented inputs that it would not be published by a credible, professional research organization." * "While NCTQ evaluated 1,130 institutions on various configurations of its standards, the report states that only 10 percent of institutions fully participated." * "The fine print in the report's Program Ratings section (p. 13) states that elementary program ratings were based on five key "standards," and secondary program ratings were based on three key "areas." NCTQ does not explain how these standards were selected or how heavily each weighed in the review. Yet NCTQ went as far as to label 163 programs with a "Consumer Alert" as a warning to parents, prospective teacher candidates and school districts." *"The American Institutes for Research (AIR) has noted the shortcomings of using document reviews to measure teacher preparation program effectiveness. In its 2012 Evaluating the Effectiveness of Teacher Preparation Programs for Support and Accountability report, AIR lists several challenges with using process measures to evaluate teacher preparation programs: The research base of a document review is not robust enough to build assessment for accountability based on process measures; process measures do not always accurately capture what actually happens in preparation programs; and process data require complex qualitative measures that are difficult to score reliably across programs." * ""Even NCTQ's own audit panel recognized in its report that NCTQ must do a better job of "clearly and exhaustively explaining methodology and what findings do and do not mean." The audit panel also questioned the validity of using course syllabi to determine the effectiveness of a program, suggesting that NCTQ must improve its method of "studying how accurately reading syllabi reflects the actual content of classroom instruction."" * "NCTQ promotes to the public that its goal is to help improve teacher preparation. Yet NCTQ outright refuses to make rubrics available publicly or individually to institutions to show where programs did and did not meet standards. It does, however, make recommendations to policy makers on how they should regulate preparation programs. If NCTQ's goal was to help improve teacher preparation, rubrics should be released so that programs could utilize that information."
* "In the "Next Steps" for prospective and current students, NCTQ's recommendations are self-promoting, public relations steps intended to further promote the review – not to improve teacher preparation for future teachers." http://aacte.org/news-room/press-releases/nctq-review-of-nations-education-schools-deceives-misinforms-public.html
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These teacher-tested approaches—from visual aids to peer modeling—help students comprehend and retain instructions the first time.
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Engaging teaching strategies and learning resources for middle school ELA and high school English students.
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Looking for new classroom ideas? Need a solution to boring worksheets? Turn them into these 7 engaging activities instead!
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Schools are using a modified version of the Six Thinking Hats technique to teach students how to give effective feedback to one another.
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I have been fortunate to visit classrooms around the country over the last 5-6 years in a variety of different capacities (check out what I saw last year). Through these visits, and in conversation…
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A look at the history of art and whether artificial intelligence can join the conversation with its image generation technology.
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I’m not sure we have fully grasped what has just happened with ChatGPT, or more generally, generative AI. It is a far more profound shif
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Providing feedback without instructors can be challenging. Can we use learners as learning evaluators? With some support, perhaps.
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My professional career centers around helping educators create engaging learning environments for their students. Often, that entails uncovering how best to use the available educational technologies. Over the course of that experience, I’ve learned something that more educators (not to mention more technology developers) should take to heart: the best tools aren’t always the newest ones.
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Self-directed learning has many positives, but it's important to learn about the drawbacks too. Find out about 5 self-directed learning problems and how to fix them.
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Many teachers’ tech toolkits are bursting at the seams and sometimes it can be a good idea to use a few tools well, rather than jump on every new resource.
However, it’s hard to resist a useful tool to help organise your classroom and provide structure for students.
Some resources require a bit of thought and exploration to figure out how they could be implemented in your classroom. Not ClassroomScreen.
It’s free.
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Engaging the fine motor system to produce letters by hand has positive effects on learning and memory
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In this post, you will find 27 Formative Assessment Tools for Your Classroom! Formative assessment is such an essential part of the learning process and student success, and many digital tools can help support this process.This list has a wide variety of features and options to help you solidify...
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From learning numbers to advanced math like calculus, the best math websites offer something for everyone. All the top free and paid options!
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Stimulate thinking at the beginning of class, and check for understanding at the end of it with these engaging opening and closing activities. Stimulate thinking at the beginning of class, and check for understanding at the end of it with these engaging activities.
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Response: 'Every Teacher Is A Language Teacher' By Larry Ferlazzo on March 17, 2015 3:35 PM
(This post is the last post in a two-part series. You can see Part One here.)
This week's question is:
What are the best strategies to use when teaching English Language Learners in content classes?
The question above is my simplified version of the actual one sent by a teacher who requested anonymity. Here is what was submitted:
I'm at my start of second school year teaching 8th grade social studies which is tested! My population of Spanish dominant students is the majority. Social studies was never taught at the elementary level. I feel hopeless. I'm using different strategies that include foldables class discussions essential questioning visuals primary sources ...etc etc!! I cant reach them! Sometimes I wonder if its me..other teachers say I work too hard. But I really want my student to learn about history but I have to be both a English teacher and social studies teacher at same time. I need help!
Part One in this series shared responses from four experienced educators: Judie Haynes, Mary Ann Zehr, Bárbara C. Cruz and Stephen J. Thornton. You can also listen to a ten-minute conversation I had with Judie and Mary Ann on my BAM! Radio Show.
Today's guests are Margo Gottlieb, Maria Montalvo-Balbed, and Tracey Takuhama-Espinosa. In addition, I've shared responses from readers.
Response From Margo Gottlieb
Margo Gottlieb is lead developer for WIDA at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and director, assessment and evaluation, at the Illinois Resource Center, Arlington Heights. Her latest publications include co-authoring and co-editing a compendium of books by Corwin on Academic Language in Diverse Classrooms; a foundational book, Definitions and Contexts, and six others, Promoting Content and Language Learning, English Language Arts and Mathematics for grade-levels K-2, 3-5, and 6-8:
Around the country, linguistically and cultural diversity is becoming part of the classroom mosaic. For English language learners to succeed academically, teachers must interweave the academic language of each discipline into their instruction. As educators begin a new school year, here are some tips for content teachers.
Partner with a language teacher in co-planning, co-constructing, and co-teaching as you share instruction, engage in classroom assessment, and assume joint responsibility for your language learners. Incorporate the students' linguistic and cultural resources and expertise into lessons and units of learning so that all students can engage in authentic and meaningful learning experiences. Use college & career readiness standards in conjunction with language development standards to gain a better understanding of the developmental and linguistic pathways to student achievement. Pair the standards-referenced skills and concepts of a topic or theme with the academic language required of those understandings. Formulate content and language targets to guide teaching and learning for a unit for all students. These targets provide a global view of key learning and guide the creation of objectives for individual or related lessons. Maintain grade-level rigor of the content while differentiate language according to the students' levels of language proficiency. Differentiation includes consideration for the students' literacy in their home language as a scaffold for English language development and as a means to communicate conceptual knowledge. Center on academic language use within and across language domains, such as during interpretative listening, interactive reading, academic conversations, and writing across the curriculum. Plan, collect, analyze, interpret, and act on evidence for student learning through performance assessment that occurs within and across lessons. Rely on students as contributors to and evaluators of their own learning as they engage in self-reflection and peer assessment. Don't forget that school is a unique place where every teacher is a language teacher and every student is a language learner.
Response From Maria Montalvo-Balbed
Maria Montalvo-Balbed has developed and taught numerous professional development classes in the areas of diversity, cultural literacy development, and authentic engagement of English learners. She is a member of the ASCD Faculty and the Fisher and Frey Cadre, where she works with schools and districts to implement customized, research-based curricula and instructional strategies:
Of course, it goes without saying that strategies are only the best strategies when they are aligned to the learning purpose. To learn more, see ASCD FIT Model authors Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey.
I do think the following areas of support are critical to a high functioning classroom that supports the needs of ELLs:
Systematic practice of the academic and social discourse. See Jeff Zwiers work for specific strategies on Academic Conversations. Students need to be engaged in continuous and strategic practice of listening, speaking, reading and writing in all courses; not just in Language Arts. The classroom teacher must be highly aware of how to set up social and metacognitive supports for ELLs. Teachers can easily do this by modeling behaviors, think-alouds, and processes, strategies for reading and writing and speaking in different contexts and to different audiences. The language overload of any course for ELLs requires that teachers use language scaffolds intentionally (See Virginia Rojas' toolkit for great ideas). Teachers must be very strategic about teaching ELLs (See ASCD Whole Child Education tenets). The systematic use of visuals/non-linguistic supports.
Response From Tracey Takuhama-Espinosa
Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, PhD, is Dean of the Faculty of Education at the Universidad de las Américas in Quito, Ecuador. She serves on an expert panel for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development to determine Teachers' New Pedagogical Knowledge, including the influence of neuroscience and technology on education, and is professor of a course on the "Neuroscience of Learning and Sustained Change" at Harvard University. She is the author of Making Classrooms Better: 50 Practical Applications of Mind, Brain, and Education Science (W. W. Norton; 2014) and Mind, Brain, and Education Science: A Comprehensive Guide to the New Brain-Based Teaching (W. W. Norton; 2010). Visit her at traceytokuhama.com:
While activities are important and this teacher is determined to find the right activities to reach her ELL 8th grade social studies students, activities are only as effective as the planning context in which they are devised.
Great ELL teachers are simply great teachers. A great teacher knows how to identify desired results before choosing an activity. The teacher should identify the objectives of each class and then try to express these objectives as competencies, or the combination of knowledge (dates, facts, formulas, people, places, etc.), skills, and attitudes (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). Once clear and concise objectives have been identified, the teacher can then decide what she will accept as evidence that she is reaching these objectives, otherwise known as her evaluation criteria. Finally, she can then consider what activities to undertake. Choosing the activities ("foldables, class discussions, essential questioning, visuals, primary sources" or others) should depend upon the objectives of the class and cannot be chosen in a vacuum. It is likely that this teacher is not meeting the success she hopes for and is working harder than her students because she has not yet identified the main objective of each class and aligned her activities accordingly.
Language skills can be learned through content. Actually, the best way to go about improving English is by teaching it through meaningful content (Snow, Met & Genesee, 1989). One key way to teach is to focus on authentic lesson planning in which the context of objectives coincides with students' own interests. The great challenge of U.S. state curricula is its focus on heavily content-based ideas ("Analyze how the American Revolution effected other nations, especially France"; "Describe the nation's blend of civic republicanism, classical liberal principles, and English parliamentary traditions" [California State Curriculum, Grade 8, 2009, p.33]), rather than on greater, global, yet personal concepts ("Why do nations go to war?"; "What's worth fighting for?"; "How does being free as a person differ from a nation being free?"). For example, devising a debate on "what's worth fighting for?" and then relating it to the American Revolution would be a far more effective way to approach the 8th grade curriculum than through "foldables" or "visuals." Depending on the objective, different activities will be most appropriate.
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The 40/40/40 rule: What's important that students understand for the next 40 days, for the next 40 months, for the next 40 years?
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A teaching approach that is based on students’ preferences sounds laudable. But this misunderstands how learning happens
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Having a theory of how people learn would allow teachers to plan pedagogy more effectively and examine all factors relevant to learning, argue Stephen L. Chew and William J. Cerbin.
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How do you increase learner engagement? And what is it anyway?
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