21st Century Educator

Our words are not enough: It's time for action

I'm fortunate to work in a school which gets it. We do a lot of the stuff that people on #edchat are describing as innovative, particularly in the area of student leadership and assessment policy. I feel respected every day, and my opinions and thoughts have a real impact on the direction our school goes. I know this is not true for many teachers though, and I hear it through the discussions we have on Twitter. It seems most teachers work in places where they have very little influence on school policy.

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I used to be a master at memorization

When I first started my career I struggled. A lot. My first job was in the School for Legal Studies which when I joined it was a relatively small high school by New York standards. I had three classes each day, two of which were double period classes. If you've ever watched Michelle Fiefer's "Dangerous Minds" you'll understand what my classes were like. It took me 3 months before I actually got one of my class' attention.

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Why mass teacher evaluation systems are flawed

There are lots of enormous flaws at the root of the current effort to evaluate teachers across the US. We could talk about how each teacher serves a much different population, or how the resources which are provided to each teacher are different because of the wealth of their educational community, or how a poor administrator can influence teacher evaluations, but there is a deeper flaw, one based on a more mathematical argument.

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Revamping Mathematics Curriculum

What if we revamped the mathematics curriculum to match the style of teaching Dan Meyer recommends? What would that look like? Watch the @ddmeyer video below from his TED talk, and then let's look at how we can make specific changes to our own teaching practice, and talk about whether or not these are changes worth making.

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Working on a new podcast for educational reform

This afternoon I had a great conversation with David Miles and Fred Mindlin. David works as an Academic Coordinator in a private school in Dhaka, Bangladesh and Fred works as an educational consultant for the Central California Writing Project.

Both of them are extremely articulate and intelligent people who have a lot to say about education. I've known David for about 5 years now ever since we worked together in London, and I met Fred for the first time this afternoon.

I asked David through Skype, and I invited Fred through Twitter, and we all met in a Skype group chat.  We decided to continue the conversation from #edchat and talk about educational reform.

This idea for a Conversation With Educators is from the podcast @betchaboy does, The Virtual Staffroom and is something I hope more teachers do. Talking with educators from around the world about what we do is a terrific experience. I hope to chat with more of you next week.

For now you can listen to this podcast episode below, or subscribe to this podcast in iTunes here.  This podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license so please feel free to remix it and share it, so long as you give proper attribution to the original work.

For those of you who are curious about the production of this podcast, it was recorded using a program called Skype Call Recorder on Windows, and slightly edited using Audacity.

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What would work to improve education?

Here's an issue which has been cropping up over and over again.  Whenever we discuss issues on Twitter, through #edchat or #iste10, or whatever educational channel we choose, we are by and large, preaching to the converted.  We don't need to prosthelytize to these people, because quite simply, they agree with us.  It's not a complete waste of time because we have the opportunity to hash out issues, look at some finer points of the issues, but I don't think it has an enormous positive effect on the overall quality of education.

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Teaching compassion to our students

How do we teach our students to be compassionate? I'm thinking about this idea this morning because of something that happened to me that I want to share.

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Making school feel more like the real world

Here's my observation.  What we have students do during school does not at all resemble what they will do when they finish university.  In fact there is literally no relationship at all, and our students can see that and of course, they rebel.  I've talked about an alternate school structure before, this post is really an extension of that post.

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Why we need to change schools

So I was struck by an interesting analogy today after reading part of a post about flipping curriculum.  The problem with current education, the post claims, is that we are focusing on cramming content into courses, rather than working fundamentally on critical thinking skills.  I thought, Yes, I totally agree, and then it came into focus, the reason WHY I agree.

Here's the argument that ran through my head.

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