Archives (page 80 of 97)

August 27, 2010 / 0 Comments

What does the relationship between higher grades and “success” in life mean?

I’m not really worried about my students’ grades. I might only be concerned if I could establish a clear connection between the grades I assign my students, and their success later in life. I’m much more concerned that my students are successful, so this might the only reason I would change my grading practices.

It’s important here that by successful that I don’t really mean by my standards. I want them to be successful by their standards and to be able to look back on their lives and say, "I lived a good life", whatever that means to them.

I don’t see how what grade I gives them will reflect in their future success. It’s possible that I may close some doors if I give a grade which is too low, or that I may open up unlikely futures if I give a grade which is too high, but at the end of the day it’s not a grade I want to give, it’s the ability to learn.

There are studies which attempt to show a relationship between a student’s grades and their future success in life, as defined by society. It’s my opinion that at best these studies can show that students who receive higher grades achieve a higher level of success as defined by a capitalist system AND even that isn’t a causal relationship, it’s almost certainly just two variables which are both in a causal relationship with a whole another set of variables.

Students who get high grades are probably good at studying, maybe because they get good family support. They may be good at memorizing information, or very carefully following instructions of teachers. There are a lots of other reasons why they get good grades. Many of these reasons are also things which lead to future success which can be measured.

There are lots of types of success which cannot be easily measured. For example, if someone becomes a fire fighter and is responsible for saving the lives of hundreds of people, I think that person is successful in life. Someone who volunteers their time and helps people find places to sleep and food to eat; they are successful in what they do. A mother or father who knows how to speak kindly to their children and involve them in decisions or a baker who makes the best cupcakes around; these people are successful, but you can’t measure their success with any standardized metric.

It is arrogant of us to assume that we as teachers have that much influence over our student’s lives. While I’ll agree that the influence of a good teacher is significant, there are so many other factors at play as well; we are just one factor among many. We should continue to push our students, and to help them learn and become good people; all of these are still important, but I think we should relax about their grades. They really don’t make that big a difference.

August 26, 2010 / 9 Comments

Eight Videos to Help Teachers Get Started Using Twitter

Here are eight videos to help teachers get started with using Twitter. The idea for these videos is to make them short and to the point and provide specific instructions on how teachers can use Twitter.

How to sign up for Twitter

Verifying your email account with Twitter

Customizing your profile on Twitter

How does Twitter work?

Installing Tweetdeck

Customizing Tweetdeck

Finding people to follow on Twitter

Participating on Twitter

August 21, 2010 / 0 Comments

You might be a hardcore Twitter user if

You might be a hardcore Twitter user if:

you look at 2000 followers as "getting started"
you think 5,000 tweets was a long time ago
you’ve ever tweeted with people in the same room as you (conferences don’t count)
you’ve considered unfollowing your partner because "they don’t post enough useful stuff"
you’ve ever spent 24 consecutive hours tweeting
you’ve ever tweeted BEFORE calling 911 when witnessing an emergency
you use 4 or more different twitter clients on the same computer
you’ve tweeted while: parachuting, swimming, skating, spelunking, etc…
you recognize when someone is back to Twitter, because "hey, that person is tweeting again!"
you miss your Twitter friends after an hour offline
you’ve ever attended multiple Tweet-ups in the same week
your Twitter withdrawal symptoms, on those rare occasions when they do happen, only take a few minutes to appear
you post a question on Twitter and get 500 responses within minutes in 3 different languages
you think the definitions on the sidebar of Twitter.com looked better at the top of the column rather than the bottom, and you tweet about your opinion
you’ve ever written your own Twitter client because the ones you use "don’t work right."
you automatically add hashtags to everything you say in real life (at least in your head)

Please add some more ideas in the comments below and I’ll incorporate them into this list.

August 21, 2010 / 0 Comments

Most effective teacher in my friend’s school

My friend, whom I met when I worked in an international school in Bangkok, worked in a bilingual school in Thailand before the school where I met him. He said it was an interesting job, but he was glad to be working at a school with a different emphasis.

The school he worked at had pretty good test results, some of the best in the country. Students would consistently score well on the state standardized tests held all over Thailand. So my friend went to observe the best teacher in the school, as measured by how well her kids did on the standardized tests.

He told me that he watched 2.5 hours of this teacher reading out answers from previous standardized tests. She did nothing else! She didn’t ask any questions, she didn’t check for any understanding from the students, she spent 150 minutes going through questions and their solutions on a multiple choice exam.

What type of education system do you want? Is this what we want to emulate? Time and time again I remind myself how grateful I am to work in the International Baccalaureate framework where the only year I have to worry about a standardized test is at the end of 12th grade. Fortunately the exams at the end of the IB program are at least well written.

July 23, 2010 / 0 Comments

What the Math class can learn from the Arts class

I just read this article from 2007, originally posted in the Boston Globe, but available here online. The point of the article is that participation in an Arts class helps students learn skills which may not be present elsewhere in their school as a result of a narrowing focus of schools on standardized testing. To summarize the article, students can learn reflection, "such skills include visual-spatial abilities, reflection, self-criticism, and the willingness to experiment and learn from mistakes" (Hetland & Winner, 2007).

It sounds to me like this list of skills closely resembles what we would consider critical thinking skills. Certainly it is an important set of skills and if this is the only place students are learning these skills, then Arts classes are critically important. However, I know that I teach these skills in my own academic area of mathematics, and that this is possible for me because I do not have to focus on a huge standardized test at the end of the school year.

In my mathematics class students are expected to write out their solutions to problems, and to reflect on what we do. Students take turn blogging about what happened in class, and commenting on each others’ summaries. Assessment is done using projects for which students are given time to detail complete solutions, and more importantly detail the thinking the students did to arrive at these solutions. Students have to evaluate their own work, and look for ways to improve it.

We take the time to do experiments in class to verify accuracy mathematical formulas. For example, we will go out to the soccer field and use cones to create right triangles, and then compare the actual lengths of the triangles to what trigonometry and the Pythagorean theorem say the lengths should be. We talk about experimental error, and the importance in accuracy of measurements. Students whose results differ greatly from the theory go back and do it again. If no one in the class were able to achieve the theoretical results, we would revise our experiment as a class and do it again. All sorts of mathematics can be taught through experiments and I find these experiences invaluable for the learning of the students.

Fortunately at the school I work at, Arts education is not in danger. We are a small private school and our head has recently invested in our students’ learning of art by hiring a full-time learning specialist for art. However I know this is not typical of schools, more and more Arts and Music are being removed from schools because of budgetary concerns and a desire to improve students’ performance on standardized testing. There just isn’t the time to devote to the Arts in the school-wide curriculum.

You can change your own classroom so that the Arts is embedded in what you do if your school district is too short-sighted. Critical thinking skills are too important to be discarded in favor of standardization of education.

July 20, 2010 / 2 Comments

A 21st Century Learning Proposal

Here is a great video shared on the Edweek blog.

This video should be something to show your staff at the beginning of the year. In fact, I’d like to make the focus of my training next year on building personal learning networks for the teachers, so that they see the value of their PLN. Some of the staff at my school are connected with teachers from other schools and other parts of the world, but most are not except in limited ways. More than anything else, I’d like my staff to see the value in creating their own learning network.

You should read the entire blog post on the Edweek blog and then decide how you will start your school year.

July 13, 2010 / 0 Comments

Working on a new podcast for educational reform

A Conversation With Educators 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.

Listen here: here

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.

July 9, 2010 / 5 Comments

Participation in the Virtual Staffroom podcast – Re-thinking #edchat?

Last night @RobinThailand invited me to join a Virtual Staffroom podcast. So I fired up Skype and accepted an invite from someone I didn’t really know before, @betchaboy. I was following him but I don’t think we had chatted much before last night.

He runs a fantastic podcast called the Virtual Staffroom. He describes it as, bringing a bunch of people together to chat. Last night, the topic was open and we started with copyright law because of a question one of the people in the conversation asked. Our discussion ranged from copyright law, to creative commons, to finding sources of images, using iPods in the classroom, DRM of said iPods, whether or not the iPad is useful in education. It was a great conversation and it felt just like we were in a staffroom discussing stuff at lunch.

The difference of course was that we had 6 people chatting from 4 different countries, representing 3 different nationalities. A conversation about copyright law is going to be richer with such different experiences of what the law actually is, and how it affects education in our different countries. About half of our conversation was about copyright in general, with consensus being that the current laws don’t make much sense. If the purpose of copyright law is to protect innovation, we agreed the current laws are failing to do this.

However, aside from what we talked about, the structure for me really worked. There were some small technical changes, but to me, this is what #edchat should be. We have this gigantic "virtual room" full of people chatting during our weekly sessions, and while I enjoy the exchange of ideas, it has gotten too big to handle. It is becoming increasingly difficult to handle the flow of information during this conversation.

If our purpose is to create conversation between educators, and exchange ideas, then I think we should look at our format more closely. Is it really achieving that? When the actual chat is over, #edchat continues more informally and works really well but when the official chat is on, I can’t really follow the entire conversation, nor would I want to. I likened #edchat to 500 people shouting in a room, all trying to be heard at once to a colleague, and once she tried it, she agreed.

I’d like to see #edchat continue, but I think that next time, I will try and pull off a few people from #edchat to have a more personal discussion via Skype. Rather than trying to have a gigantic conversation with everyone, I think a weekly discussion with 4 or 5 other teachers via live audio would be far more valuable. Anyone want to join me next week?

July 9, 2010 / 1 Comment

Why is individualization in education so important?

Tonight I was at a birthday party for a young boy; I was invited as a result of my son being about the same age as the birthday boy. While we were dolling out the ice cream and cake for the 5 boys at the party, I was struck by the realization that there was a relationship between their choices for ice cream and cake, and how we need to look at education.

Here’s what each boy wanted for this ice cream and cake.

What I noticed is that each of these boys, who ranged in age from 3 to 7, chose a different style of ice cream. Already, by the age of 3, these kids had preferences about what types of ice cream they wanted, whether or not they wanted chocolate syrup with it, and how much cake (if at all). These boys are all very different already.

The assumption that each child’s education has to be the same irks me to no end because I know that every child is different. Nothing is more clear to me from this simple example that these children are individuals from a very young age, and as such they need to be treated differently; they need to have their needs met.

More than at any other time in history we have the ability to personalize learning for every student, but we keep moving toward standardized curriculum, externally moderated work, and increased accountability in the minutia of what we do as educators. It is time to recognize that our students need more than this because if keep giving them all the same education, we will keep seeing some of them choosing not to participate in our system.

July 7, 2010 / 4 Comments

Arguments for and against Internet Filters in schools

A common problem that is discussed on Twitter between educators is that they don’t have full access to the Internet due to a filter installed either at their school or at the district level in their area. There are a number of arguments for and against the existence of these filters, summarized in the table below.

Arguments for Internet Filters	Arguments against Internet filters
They satisfy need for control over what kids do in school.	They don’t teach responsible Internet use.
They prevent students from accessing sites which could be dangerous.	Useful tools are blocked.
They block access to social networking sites that may result in cyberbullying.	They cause network lag and slow down access to the Internet.
They make it easy to comply with educational regulations and laws involving Internet use by students.	They are easily circumvented anyway. Google “unblock websites at school” or “proxy servers unblock websites”
	They teach kids how to avoid obstacles rather than how to solve problems.
	We are not teaching real life skills then, real life does not come with filters
	Internet filters tend to most often filter content for the teachers rather than the students: they know how to get by them.
	Within five years, the idea of an Internet filter will be antiquated. With the development of 4G networks and the growth of smartphones, it’s only a matter of time before the vast majority of students have unfiltered access to the Internet in their pockets, whether IT dept’s like it or not.
	Many school districts have removed Internet filters with no ill effects.
	They create an artificial, limited research environment that will not help them when they move on to jobs or higher ed.
	The prevent valuable learning experiences about the risks involved with the Internet from taking place.

This document was produced by the collective wisdom of a few educators from #edchat working together. Our objective is to summarize all of the arguments for and against Internet filters in schools. The idea is, if we have the information and the argument worked out, our individual discussions with our local administrators will be a lot easier.

Most of us who chat on Twitter think that the Internet filters aren’t accomplishing their goal, which we think is to keep our students safe. What do they accomplish then? Mostly keep kids from making mistakes in school where they can be assisted with the consequences of their mistakes, and they prevent students from connecting to the most useful resources they could be using.

If you want to participate in the creation of this document, please feel free to add your thoughts here.

The Reflective Educator