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Many Years of School Reform: A Veteran Teacher Reflects on Changes in Kids and the Classroom
The attention span of young kids in particular has shortened, both in the intellectual and physical sense, over the duration of Ticia’s career. Roughly 50% of kids need to be moving all the time – feet, bodies, hands, fingers — whereas at the beginning of Ticia’s working life compulsive movement described perhaps only one or two out of a class of 30. This is one category of school measurement where boys have continued to reign supreme. Continue reading
At Risk Youth: The Teacher’s the Thing by Which to Catch the Student Being
Summary: Meta-studies of psychotherapeutic outcomes, transposed onto relationships between teacher and student, suggest a preponderance of any change in an at risk kid’s academics stems directly from a positive relationship with a teacher. You know the kid. He sits near … Continue reading
Schools and Culture: Beyond Separate and Unequal
Summary: Acceleration in the mortality rate among low income white males due to suicide and drug abuse holds a mirror up to a war on drugs which targeted disproportionately the black community. The comparison puts in relief the distance between … Continue reading
Posted in At Risk Students, Schools and Culture
Tagged at risk students, black white relationship, desegregation, education and politics, heroin epidemic, interracial relationships, low-income students, police community relations, resegregation, social communication, teaching, war on drugs
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School Reform: Listen Deeply to What Teachers Know
Summary: Recent research identifies truths about kids and pedagogy that have long been embedded in the practice of American educators. Time is long past to act more consistently on teacher insights. The American teacher is targeted from some sectors as … Continue reading
Posted in At Risk Students, School Reform, Schools and Politics
Tagged Adverse Childhood Experiences, at risk students, education and politics, educational research, empowering teachers, phonetic reading, school reform, teacher knowledge, teacher professionalism, teaching, trauma in students
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School Reform Via Targeted Hires and “Big Data”
Summary: The use of “big data” and derivative algorithms to predict which applicants will be successful hires in companies may prove useful in the identification of quality teacher candidates. The fact that 46% of new teachers leave the profession within … Continue reading
School Reform and the Confusion of Labels
Summary: Who are the school reformers, and how do we tell them apart? And what do traditional labels such as “liberal” and “conservative” mean in this context? Who are the reformers in American education? Honestly, in my time in schools, … Continue reading
Teaching/Learning Lexicon: “Explain” and “Guide”
Summary: This post extends the “Lexicon” of teaching and learning introduced 8/23/11. It may be useful to review that post before diving into what follows….. Here be the introductory paragraph from the 8/23/11 post, which sets the groundwork for this … Continue reading
Posted in A teaching/learning lexicon
Tagged guide students, introduce new material, learning, teaching
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Schools and Politics: Let Us Now Praise on Labor Day
Summary: Around Labor Day, a salute to teachers and their fellow travelers, and a review of the nature of teachers unions, professional or labor, within the current political context. Though past Labor Day, I am belatedly inspired to echo the … Continue reading
Posted in School Bureaucracy, Schools and Politics
Tagged teachers' unions, teaching, teaching culture
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Teaching/Learning Lexicon: A Paradoxical Implementation
Though my last post, “Teaching/Learning Lexicon: An Introduction”, was some part whimsy and some part semantic history, at my high school the concepts in that last piece are embodied, paradoxically, in a data driven effort by our ninth and tenth … Continue reading
A Teaching/Learning Lexicon: Introduction
More by whimsy at first, but later by design, a number of years ago I began examining the derivations of words such as “teach”, and “learn”, and followed their origins into associations themselves derived from my experience teaching, and from … Continue reading
Posted in A teaching/learning lexicon
Tagged learning, meet student where he is, student motivation, teaching
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