by Scott McLeod | Apr 9, 2015 | Assessment, Mind Dump |
Peter Greene said:
[When advocates] come to explain how crucial PARCC testing is for your child’s future, you might try asking some questions:
- Exactly what is the correspondence between PARCC results and college readiness? Given the precise data, can you tell me what score my eight year old needs to get on the test to be guaranteed at least a 3.75 GPA at college?
- Does it matter which college he attends, or will test results guarantee he is ready for all colleges?
- Can you show me the research and data that led you to conclude that Test Result A = College Result X? How exactly do you know that meeting the state’s politically chosen cut score means that my child is prepared to be a college success?
- Since the PARCC tests math and language, will it still tell me if my child is ready to be a history or music major? How about geology or women’s studies?
- My daughter plans to be a stay-at-home mom. Can she skip the test? Since that’s her chosen career, is there a portion of the PARCC that tests her lady parts and their ability to make babies?
- Which section of the PARCC tests a student’s readiness to start a career as a welder? Is it the same part that tests readiness to become a ski instructor, pro football player, or dental assistant?
- I see that the PARCC will be used to “customize instruction.” Does that mean you’re giving the test tomorrow (because it’a almost November already)? How soon will the teacher get the detailed customizing information– one week? Ten days? How will the PARCC results help my child’s choir director and phys ed teacher customize instruction?
… The PARCC may look like just one more poorly-constructed standardized math and language test, but it is apparently super-duper magical, with the ability to measure every aspect of a child’s education and tell whether the child is ready for college and career, regardless of which college, which major, which career, and which child we are talking about. By looking at your eight year old’s standardized math and language test, we can tell whether she’s on track to be a philosophy major at Harvard or an airline pilot! It’s absolutely magical!
Never has a single standardized test claimed so much magical power with so little actual data to back up its assertions.
via http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2014/10/parcc-is-magical.html
Image credit: Caution: Magician Ahead!, Kevin Trotman
by Scott McLeod | Apr 5, 2015 | Learning and Teaching, Mind Dump, Student Agency and Voice |
Audrey Watters said:
we’re seeing calls for an hour: “A Genius Hour.” “An Hour of Code.” An hour.
Is that hour really that subversive? What does it mean that schools are applauded when students are sanctioned – for one hour – to follow their passions? What message does that send them about the rest of their day and week at school? Does an hour even count as incremental change?
…
Are these efforts transformative? And are they sustainable? Will these hours or days remain in place? Or will they face the same fate of Google’s policy, and be quickly set aside when schools’ goals trump students’ interests?
Don’t we need to think about how to re-evaluate 100% of time in order to make school more student-centered, not simply fiddle with a fraction of it?
via http://hackeducation.com/2015/02/14/genius-hour
by Scott McLeod | Apr 2, 2015 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Learning and Teaching, Mind Dump |
Carl Hendrick wrote:
in many schools it would appear that teachers are working significantly harder than the pupils in their charge, and not so much because the kids are lazy but rather because of an institutionalised miasma that is obsessed with measuring everything (usually poorly) that privileges the spreadsheet over the individual and which has infantilised the process of learning to such a degree that actually knowing stuff is deemed less important than merely appearing to know stuff
via http://staffrm.io/@carlhendrick/dmRoWd4V1D
by Scott McLeod | Mar 31, 2015 | Learning and Teaching, Mind Dump |
Bob Lenz said:
Teachers have long struggled with the tension between breadth and depth.
It’s a hard choice, hard enough that we are tempted to avoid it, dismiss it as a false choice, or contend that it is a dilemma we can dissolve through tinkering. Maybe we don’t have to choose between covering a lot of content and focusing on a particular concept or skill. Maybe we can find a way to do both at the same time.
We shouldn’t kid ourselves. The tension is inescapable, and the choice is unavoidable: go with depth.
Depth is what the world demands of us. The explosion of human knowledge is not a 21st century phenomenon; it happened in the last century. Today, in this era of Big Data, explosive can hardly describe the exponential rate of growth. “Every two days,” says former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “we now create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.”
So the answer to exploding knowledge is not more schooling but a different kind of schooling. This is what the concept of deeper learning is all about and why it came to be. To pretend that we can “cover” everything that students need to know is to tilt at windmills. We must rid ourselves of any residual notions that education is the transmission of needed knowledge. Rather, we must embrace the reality that we are teaching skills, and one skill most generally: how to ride a tsunami of knowledge whose future content we can’t even begin to imagine.
What this means, ultimately, is that content, though still vitally important, is always a means to the end of some underlying, conceptual understanding. Decades of research bear this out: when deep, conceptual understanding is achieved, learning is enduring, flexible, and real.
via http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning_deeply/2015/03/designing_for_deeper_learning.html
by Scott McLeod | Mar 31, 2015 | Leadership and Vision, Mind Dump |
Will Richardson said:
I think the fact that only 44% of our kids reporting engagement in high school strongly suggests [that school is] “broken.” I think the difference of educational opportunities for the kids in Camden v. the kids at Lawrenceville Prep is “broken.” I think spending an inordinate amount of time on curriculum that will soon be forgotten, curriculum that most kids don’t care about despite our best efforts to make them care, curriculum that then gets assessed in ways that really don’t show if kids can actually apply it and is used to evaluate teachers in a blatantly unfair way… all of that is “broken.”
via http://willrichardson.com/post/114524327210/can-we-talk-about-change-without-hurting-feelings
by Scott McLeod | Feb 5, 2015 | Learning and Teaching, Mind Dump |
Don Berg said:
I suspect that most teachers are nurturing, or at least want to be, and that they already make a meaningful difference in the lives of some small proportion of their students despite the nature of the system.
But as wonderful as that is, the system has no mechanism for supporting, let alone encouraging, individual nurturing behaviors. In fact, the system suppresses nurturing behaviors.
In 2009 the peer-reviewed journal Educational Psychologist published a literature review article by Professor Johnmarshall Reeve on why the majority of teachers act in ways that thwart the primary psychological need for autonomy.
He suggests that both the system and the individuals in the situations studied reinforce behaviors that are exactly the opposite of nurturing in a variety of ways, not because of back room conspiracies nor venal depravity, but because of tragic misunderstandings.
The deleterious effects of the system overwhelm the positive effects of nurturing individuals because the system is currently organized in a manner that undermines nurturing, the very foundation upon which education is built.
Ironic, don’t you think?
The system is not all-powerful, so it does not always undermine the foundation completely.
But it does its undermining work relentlessly day after day after day and it does more harm than most people want to acknowledge.
Learn more at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/every-parent-s-dilemma-a-book-project
by Scott McLeod | Feb 4, 2015 | Mind Dump, Safety and Security |
Doug Johnson said:
If at the end of the last ice age the natives of Minnesota had refused to let their children practice agriculture because it might weaken their hunting skills (although the animals were moving north and it was easier staying fed growing corn), would they have been doing them a service? As information becomes ubiquitous, learning becomes self-motivated, and post-literacy becomes the norm, are we doing our students a service by keeping them from using the tools of the technologic climate change that is on us now?
via http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com/blue-skunk-blog/2015/2/3/adapting-to-technologic-climate-change.html
by Scott McLeod | Feb 4, 2015 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Mind Dump |
Mercedes Schneider said:
I think that any time you have a situation where information is as tightly controlled as it is by education officials in Louisiana, that should raise a real red flag. If you can’t find data that hasn’t been massaged or indexed or changed to the point where it no longer means much, that’s a red flag that there’s something going on that officials don’t want us to know. And if reporters aren’t going to ask those questions, somebody else is going to have to.
via http://edushyster.com/?p=6350
by Scott McLeod | Feb 3, 2015 | Leadership and Vision, Mind Dump |
Leslie Wilson said:
On one hand, [school administrators] have entered this century keen on improving non-performing schools, knowing the moral imperative of students’ using technologies, personalizing learning, and seeking to comply with state and federal mandates. What amazes me is that at the same time they ‘lead’ as though they are oblivious to current research and best practices regarding organizations, systems, and high quality leadership. How to help them? That’s what my colleagues and I are grappling with.
via http://www.k12blueprint.com/content/peel-back-onion-organize-success
by Scott McLeod | Feb 3, 2015 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Learning and Teaching, Mind Dump |
Ellie Herman said:
If teaching is an art and a science, I’m scared that in our national conversation about education, we are so intent on demanding accountability for mastering the ‘science’ part that we’re creating conditions that seem designed to crush teachers’ souls. When our system treats teachers with disdain, creating accountability measures whose underlying premise is that teachers are so incompetent and lazy that they need to be monitored rigidly, strictly and incessantly, at what point does that myth become corrosive to a teacher’s humanity?
How do we nurture and encourage the qualities teachers need in order to use all these techniques in the first place, the faith, the compassion, the patience, the passion for a subject? Can we start by valuing those qualities – by which I do not mean putting a dollar value on them? Can we acknowledge and respect the individual lives and experiences that teachers are bringing to the classroom every day, without which none of what they’re teaching would be of any use to anyone? Can we balance our need for accountability with our equal need for inspiration?
via http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/02/02/what-makes-a-great-teacher
