When 40% of an individual teacher’s students fail a standardized test, I imagine the teacher would be scrutinized, and rightly so. Whatever I think of standardized tests, 40% of a teacher’s students shouldn’t fail one, or something’s wrong with the teacher’s instruction. If 40% of a school’s students failed a standardized test, the school might…
I wrote this last night thinking of submitting it to the Faculty Room, but I realized I misunderstood our focus question, and I didn’t want my post to go to waste. Thus, here are my thoughts on some choices teachers ought to have about their profession and environment. Teachers have differing degrees of choice in…
Miguel Guhlin has joined the UbD Educators wiki and wants your help. He is posting UbD chapter summaries and wants input from other wiki members. I want to ask wiki members a question: Miguel suggested that we unlock those summary pages to allow nonmembers to participate. What do you think? My idea was that allowing…
In our high school literature studies, we often stick to tried and true classics, which is fine. There are very good reasons why these books are classics. But what if you want to read something newer, but somehow related to a classic? What if you want to extend learning for your students and want to…
The Southern Association of Colleges and School (SACS), the chief accreditation agency here in Georgia, is recommending that Clayton County Schools lose its accreditation. The AJC article linked focuses on the fact that loss of accreditation would strip Clayton students of HOPE Scholarship eligibility. At any rate, the real losers in this system are the…
[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/yqmLiWvoRfA” width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /] I am currently taking two online professional development courses through a local school system. Both are book studies, and if you look in the sidebar, you can guess which two books. The interesting thing to me is that one group is active, dynamic, and interested in conversation about the…
Today was a professional development day, and we had an interesting guest speaker on the topic of discipline. I wanted to share part of what he discussed today with edubloggers in hopes that we can contribute to the dialogue. Do you think teaching is harder today than it was for your teachers when you were…
I have mentioned before that the UbD Educators wiki has grown quiet. I think there may be two reasons for this: We’re all busy educators who have difficulty finding the time to create, post, and/or comment on others’ posted UbD units. We’re not getting what we need out of the wiki. It’s not in my…
You may recall I am reading Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat for an online PLU course. In chapter six, he describes the kinds of people who will be “untouchable,” that is their jobs will be safe in the flat world. I admit to thinking that teaching is one of those “untouchable” jobs. However, I…
I recently started using StumbleUpon (here’s my profile) in my Firefox browser to discover new sites, and I feel stupid for not trying it before now. Poking around the Internet for the last week or so, I have “stumbled” upon some good sites (and found some on my own): Read Print has online books. I…
