Education is Dynamic (at least it should be)

Editorial:
We have the mission, we have the vision, we have the petition, the only thing we are now missing is the approval to actually open.

We have been working on this project for two years now. Along the way, adapting to all of the current changes in Common Core Standards, English Language Development (ELD) standards, Local Control Funding Formulas, accountability requirements, up-to-the-minute technology as well as many other changes occurring currently in education.

Parents in the community are anxious for our school to open its doors.

Unfortunately, regardless of all of the parental support, community support, achievement data showing the great need for another educational option, and a well detailed plan to open and implement a new and innovative way to increase academic achievement for our at-risk community, our petition has failed to receive an approval.

This is a fail for our students...our future community members...our future society.

The team working on this project has over 60 years of cumulative experience working in education with at-risk students. We KNOW what is missing and how to engage at-risk students to enable them to achieve academic success. We know that our model will fill the voids left by the current educational model.

Education should be dynamic. However, this mindset don't necessarily translate well onto a plan or petition because most plans are expected to be written in a very traditional manner mirroring the current educational system. No two students are alike, yet the current system tries to educate them as if they were.

Our school will be able to adapt to the changing needs of the students and address their individual needs because of our school's culture. A culture that includes flexibility in adapting and teaching what the students need, when they need it. In other words, the teachers are adapting to the students, not the other way around. In addition, our small school's size will support a culture of relationship building with our students from kindergarten through sixth grade. This will enable teachers adapt to and support the great emotional needs many of our students must overcome before learning becomes a priority. There's no better way to explain it than to say that the education at our school will be dynamic.

We are willing, able and ready to demonstrate our capacity, and feel terrible that every year that passes, more students will continue to hate going to school, tune out, and then drop out. We have so many bright children who are falling through the cracks because their needs (both academic and emotional) are not being met.

We know we can make a positive difference ...if only our school was given a chance.

Rethinking Homework~ The Research Behind the Myth

Rethinking Homework

By Alfie Kohn

After spending most of the day in school, children are typically given additional assignments to be completed at home.  This is a rather curious fact when you stop to think about it, but not as curious as the fact that few people ever stop to think about it. 

It becomes even more curious, for that matter, in light of three other facts:

1.  The negative effects of homework are well known.  They include children’s frustration and exhaustion, lack of time for other activities, and possible loss of interest in learning.  Many parents lament the impact of homework on their relationship with their children; they may also resent having to play the role of enforcer and worry that they will be criticized either for not being involved enough with the homework or for becoming too involved.

2.  The positive effects of homework are largely mythical.  In preparation for a book on the topic, I’ve spent a lot of time sifting through the research.  The results are nothing short of stunning.  For starters, there is absolutely no evidence of any academic benefit from assigning homework in elementary or middle school.  For younger students, in fact, there isn’t even a correlation between whether children do homework (or how much they do) and any meaningful measure of achievement.  At the high school level, the correlation is weak and tends to disappear when more sophisticated statistical measures are applied.  Meanwhile, no study has ever substantiated the belief that homework builds character or teaches good study habits.

3.  More homework is being piled on children despite the absence of its value.  Over the last quarter-century the burden has increased most for the youngest children, for whom the evidence of positive effects isn’t just dubious; it’s nonexistent. 

It’s not as though most teachers decide now and then that a certain lesson really ought to continue after school is over because meaningful learning is so likely to result from such an assignment that it warrants the intrusion on family time.   Homework in most schools isn’t limited to those occasions when it seems appropriate and important.  Rather, the point of departure seems to be:  “We’ve decided ahead of time that children will have to do something every night (or several times a week).  Later on we’ll figure out what to make them do.”

I’ve heard from countless people across the country about the frustration they feel over homework.  Parents who watch a torrent of busywork spill out of their children’s backpacks wish they could help teachers understand how the cons overwhelmingly outweigh the pros.  And teachers who have long harbored doubts about the value of homework feel pressured by those parents who mistakenly believe that a lack of afterschool assignments reflects an insufficient commitment to academic achievement.  Such parents seem to reason that as long as their kids have lots of stuff to do every night, never mind what it is, then learning must be taking place.

What parents and teachers need is support from administrators who are willing to challenge the conventional wisdom.  They need principals who question the slogans that pass for arguments:  that homework creates a link between school and family (as if there weren’t more constructive ways to make that connection!), or that it “reinforces” what students were taught in class (a word that denotes the repetition of rote behaviors, not the development of understanding), or that it teaches children self-discipline and responsibility (a claim for which absolutely no evidence exists).

Above all, principals need to help their faculties see that the most important criterion for judging decisions about homework (or other policies, for that matter) is the impact they’re likely to have on students’ attitudes about what they’re doing.  “Most of what homework is doing is driving kids away from learning,” says education professor Harvey Daniels.  Let’s face it:  Most children dread homework, or at best see it as something to be gotten through.  Thus, even if it did provide other benefits, they would have to be weighed against its likely effect on kids’ love of learning.

Click here to read the entire article.

Delaying Gratification~ As Important as IQ

The following article from Bloomberg Business Week (Link to Business Week Article) gives us an insight to the famous marshmallow test and suggests that supporting children in having success later in life not only depends on delayed gratification, but persuading them that there is something worth waiting for when they grow up.

Walter Mischel’s marshmallow test is one of the best-known studies in the history of psychology. In the 1960s, Mischel, then a professor at Stanford, took nursery-school students, put them in a room one-by-one, and gave them a treat (they could choose a cookie, a pretzel stick, or a marshmallow) and the following deal: They could eat the treat right away, or wait 15 minutes until the experimenter returned. If they waited, they would get an extra treat. Tracking the kids over time, Mischel found that the ability to hold out in this seemingly trivial exercise had real and profound consequences. As they matured and became adults, the kids who had shown the ability to wait got better grades, were healthier, enjoyed greater professional success, and proved better at staying in relationships—even decades after they took the test. They were, in short, better at life.

Mischel’s work has been enormously influential, making its way into popular culture (most recently in this year’s romantic comedy The Five-Year Engagement) in a way that few academic studies have. It has changed the way educators and psychologists think about success: The lesson is that it’s not just intelligence that matters, but self-control and patience and being able to tame one’s impulses—from the desire to eat the marshmallow to the desire to blow off an exam or have an affair.

A new study (PDF), however, suggests that we may be taking, at best, an incomplete lesson from Mischel’s work. Celeste Kidd, a cognitive science graduate student at the University of Rochester, is the lead author on the paper. When she was younger, Kidd spent some time working in shelters for homeless families. She began to wonder how growing up in such a setting, full of change and uncertainty, might shape the way kids responded to the sort of situation Mischel’s study presented. “Working there gave me some strong intuitions about what kids who were in that situation would do, given the marshmallow task,” she says. “I’m fairly sure those kids would eat the marshmallow right away.” Not because they were weak-willed, but because very little in their upbringing had given them much reason to believe that adults would do what they said they would. What was missing from Mischel’s famous experiment, Kidd argues, was trust.

Kidd’s own version of the marshmallow study was designed to test the effect of trust. First, the three- to five-year-olds in the study were primed to think of the researchers as either reliable or unreliable. In the first part of the study, the researchers handed over a piece of paper and a jar of used crayons, then told a child to either use those crayons or wait for a better set of art supplies. In the second part of the study, the experimenter gave the child a small sticker and told the young subject to either use that one or wait for bigger, better stickers. For half the kids, the experimenter kept the bargain, returning with a loaded tray of markers, crayons, and colored pencils, then several big stickers. For the other half, the experimenter returned a few minutes later to say, apologetically, that there weren’t in fact any better art supplies or any better stickers.

After this, the kids were given the marshmallow test. The results were dramatic: Nine out of the 14 kids in the reliable condition held out 15 minutes for a second marshmallow, while only one of the 14 in the unreliable condition did. If kids were unsure they were going to get a second marshmallow, they didn’t bother to wait.

As it turns out, Mischel himself has looked at the role trust and confidence play in a person’s ability to delay gratification. Reached while traveling in Europe and asked about the new study, he responded with an e-mail linking to three of his early papers. One of them, from 1961, looked at whether coming from a fatherless household affected a child’s willingness to wait for a reward.

But the descriptions of Mischel’s work have focused mainly on determination and grit, and many of the charter schools and educational researchers that have taken the marshmallow results to heart tend to see self-control as a unitary quality that can explain both our childhood decisions and our adult outcomes. In Kidd’s study, the willingness to wait is more of a situational trait. Rather than being engaged in a desperate struggle against their own appetites, the young subjects of her study were carefully calculating the likelihood that they would actually get a second marshmallow. Her work suggests that getting kids to be better at waiting—in the lab and in life—is a matter of persuading them that there’s something worth waiting for.

How's This for a Change... The $4 Million Teacher

The $4 Million Teacher~ 
Adapted from Amanda Ripley's forthcoming book, "The Smartest Kids in the World-and How They Got That Way, " Copyright © 2013

Kim Ki-hoon earns $4 million a year in South Korea, where he is known as a rock-star teacher—a combination of words not typically heard in the rest of the world. Mr. Kim has been teaching for over 20 years, all of them in the country's private, after-school tutoring academies, known as hagwons. Unlike most teachers across the globe, he is paid according to the demand for his skills—and he is in high demand.

Mr. Kim works about 60 hours a week teaching English, although he spends only three of those hours giving lectures. His classes are recorded on video, and the Internet has turned them into commodities, available for purchase online at the rate of $4 an hour. He spends most of his week responding to students' online requests for help, developing lesson plans and writing accompanying textbooks and workbooks (some 200 to date).

"The harder I work, the more I make," he says matter of factly. "I like that."

I traveled to South Korea to see what a free market for teaching talent looks like—one stop in a global tour to discover what the U.S. can learn from the world's other education superpowers. Thanks in part to such tutoring services, South Korea has dramatically improved its education system over the past several decades and now routinely outperforms the U.S. Sixty years ago, most South Koreans were illiterate; today, South Korean 15-year-olds rank No. 2 in the world in reading, behind Shanghai. The country now has a 93% high-school graduation rate, compared with 77% in the U.S.

Tutoring services are growing all over the globe, from Ireland to Hong Kong and even in suburban strip malls in California and New Jersey. Sometimes called shadow education systems, they mirror the mainstream system, offering after-hours classes in every subject—for a fee. But nowhere have they achieved the market penetration and sophistication of hagwons in South Korea, where private tutors now outnumber schoolteachers.

Read the entire article here:  The $4 Million Teacher

Education Opens Doors, Creativity Opens Windows...

An Editorial...

Education opens doors, creativity opens windows. Both are needed to be successful in the 21st century.

Education, however, doesn't necessarily mean you must have an advanced degree. Education means you graduate from high school fully prepared and qualified to attend an institution of higher learning. The doors are open for that choice. Though, moving on to higher education also means there are potentially more doors that open.

In light of the ramification of education, it is of the utmost importance that the knowledge and skills learned in high school prepare students to thrive in the real world by knowing how to write well, speak articulately, solve problems both individually and in groups, and analyze and critically interact with situations encountered daily.

But, that's only part of the equation to success in the 21st century...

Pair that knowledge with creativity. Not necessarily the ability to draw well or play an instrument delightfully, but the ability to think outside of the box. The ability to make connects between things that no one has thought of before. The ability to zig when everyone else is zagging. Creativity creates opportunities and opens windows.

For our most needy students, education these days falls short in both of these areas. One can look at data from colleges and universities and see that many minority students who do manage to graduate, and not drop out like many Latinos tend to do, need to take remedial writing courses in college. Many college students are also not very proficient in giving presentations or using their analytic and critical thinking skills. Why should they be good at these skills when most of their schooling has revolved around the memorization of facts and learning test taking strategies?

In terms of creativity, in most cases, it's pretty much eradicated beginning the first day of kindergarten. Students are taught to conform. Furthermore, students are labeled as difficult or challenging if they don't fit into neat scholar "boxes" and follow expectations right away.

It almost seems as though some teachers are trying to create drones in schools. But in their defense, that's how they were taught in school and if it worked for them, why shouldn't it work for their students?

Well, we could go on and on about that last question, but here's another question to ponder...

What can WE do to help prepare students to be successful in the 21st century?

How can we help them turn their dreams into successful tomorrows?

Here's an idea...how about we start by implementing this 21st century way of thinking ourselves and use both our education and creativity to come up with some solutions...

In other words, Be the change you want to see...

Si se puede...

Expect change as education moves into 21st century

It isn’t uncommon for parents to look over their children’s schoolwork and think to themselves, “I don’t remember learning that at their age.” It also isn’t uncommon for a parent to ask a child for help using a new electronic gadget or figuring out an app.

There is no doubt that technology is changing how we live our daily lives. That means that today’s generation must also learn and be taught differently to keep up with the pace of technology’s development.

Many schools are using the phrase “21st century learning” or “21st century skills” to describe this movement that is refining the goals of education. Ultimately, 21st century learning will be learner-driven. No longer will learning come from the top down. Students will be prepared to drive their own educations.

This type of education does not necessarily take place within four walls. Students will use the Internet through their cell phones and computers, and they’ll chat with friends on a social networking site. The teacher’s role will be to monitor and issue assignments via virtual classrooms.

The overarching learning goals for students will not change. These subjects include math, language and social and physical sciences. Other subjects will also become equally important: the environment, health and financial and civic literacy. The difference will be in how the students learn such subjects. The “how” includes what many educators are referring to as the “4 C’s.”

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: This refers to the ability to use facts, knowledge and data to effectively solve problems.

Creativity and Innovation: This is the ability to create new ideas using a wide range of techniques and to be able to develop, implement and communicate those ideas effectively. The definition can go further to include the ability to accept failure as an opportunity to learn, understanding that creativity and innovation is a cyclical process of small successes and frequent mistakes.

Communication: This is the ability to articulate thoughts and ideas effectively using oral, written and non-verbal communication skills and a variety of multiple media and technologies — all in diverse environments.

Collaboration: This is working effectively and respectfully with diverse teams while exercising flexibility and willingness to be helpful in making necessary compromises to accomplish a common goal. This includes assuming shared responsibility for collaborative work and valuing the individual contributions made by each team member.

The definitions for school, teacher and learner will be revised to reflect this new learning environment. Schools will go from buildings to nerve centers with walls that are transparent — connecting teachers, students and the community to the wealth of knowledge that exists in the world. The primary role of the teacher as a dispenser of information will shift to an orchestrator of learning and helping students turn information into knowledge — and knowledge into wisdom.

Learners also need to be seen in a new context. Their interest must be maintained by helping them see that what they are learning prepares them for the real world. Their curiosity must be instilled. They should be excited to become even more resourceful so that they will continue to learn outside the formal school day.

Please remember that shifting schools to a 21st century learning environment will take time. However, be prepared. Soon, older students will be able to take their electronic devices to school and use them in the classroom. Hardcover textbooks will be replaced with e-books. These simple changes begin the transformation to the future 21st century learning environment.

Read more: http://www.vcstar.com/news/2012/oct/31/expect-change-as-education-moves-into-21st/#ixzz2B7pzlNj0
- vcstar.com 


Read more: http://www.vcstar.com/news/2012/oct/31/expect-change-as-education-moves-into-21st/#ixzz2B7phSWOR - vcstar.com

Pearson Introduces Schoolwide Improvement Model at National Summit

At a National Summit in Orlando today, Pearson will introduce its “Schoolwide Improvement Model” (SIM), a comprehensive research-based approach for attaining sustainable systemwide change in K-12 schools. Forged in partnership with school districts large and small, urban and rural, the new innovative and flexible Schoolwide Improvement Model represents the culmination of two decades of verifiable third-party research, experience and proven results, including the combined heritage and proven success of America’s Choice and Pearson’s Learning Teams.

Alison Wagner, President of Pearson’s School Achievement Services, said, “Our new Schoolwide Improvement Model is a direct response to all that we’ve learned from our rich experiences working with schools around the country and studying best practices around the world.”

Wagner said Pearson’s Schoolwide Improvement Model is built on five essential components:

1. Standards-aligned curriculum, instruction and assessment;
2. High-performance leadership, management and organization;
3. Data-driven culture;
4. High achievement for students and engagement of staff, parents and the community; and,
5. Sustainability for continuous improvement.

To read the entire article, click here:Pearson Introduces Schoolwide Improvement Model at National Summit