The Teaching Matters Blog is Changing!

We recently launched a new website, and are moving our blog to www.teachingmatters.org/blog.  The new RSS feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/edupress.

Please update your bookmark and RSS feed, and checkout the new post: 2009 Innovative Principal Forum

Realizing the Promise of the 21st Century School: Leadership Forum

We are pleased to invite school leaders to our Annual School Leadership Forum 2009! 

We have a fantastic  group of principals and other school leaders presenting on: 

Realizing the Promise of the 21st Century School: A Roadmap for Innovation

Wednesday, July 15, 2009
2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
475 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10115
Annual Forum for School Leaders

 

More information on the program is included below. Please let your school leaders know!

 

What is a 21st century school?  Technology is radically changing every sector of our society, yet schools remain largely unchanged. Or do they? Hear from a panel of innovative NYC school leaders on the vanguard of rethinking urban education. They will speak about their experiences regarding what is important, the challenges and what’s possible!

• Alisa Berger: Principal, NYC iSchool
• Sarah Scrogin: Principal, East Bronx Academy for the Future
• Gregg Korrol: Principal, PS 101
• Julian Cohen: Director, New School Development

Teaching Matters will also provide a new and simple assessment tool for gauging where your school lies on a continuum of the 21st century school outcomes. It will help you evaluate your school’s readiness and offer a roadmap of ideas for innovation in those areas you deem most critical.

Wine & cheese will be served!

All principals who attend will be eligible to enter a raffle to jump-start a 21st century classroom with:
15 FREE Flip Video Cameras or 5 FREE Netbooks

Let your principal or school leader know today!!

Please RSVP to our Annual Forum for School Leaders by Wednesday July 8th to LMorris@teachingmatters.org or   212.870.3505

PS 5 Students in the Bronx Document the Impact of the XO

Check out the students at PS 5 in the Port Morris section of the Bronx and their amazing documentary about the history and impact of Nicholas Negroponte’s ground breaking XO pilot project in their school. The video speaks for itself.. I don’t want to give anything away.

Twitter and Facebook – Your First Source for Current Events in Social Studies?

Iran Protests

So I was thinking about the teaching opportunity presented by the Iran election. What a way to see democracy in action…   Yet, until a few minutes ago, where would my students get their news? Not old media.

I just spent an hour searching facebook (search IRAN) and twitter  #iranelection and couldn’t believe the video and posts I was finding.  For one, I found out I should wear green to show my support for the protestors and then watched a whole bunch of videos of riots and marches.

 

Yet, hours later, CNN finally got with the story. Tear Gas and Twitter: Iranians Take their Protest Online http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=92330174188&h=CHHYj&u=KAJNK&ref=nf

The Middle has Spoken!

Over 250 students from 25 New York City middle schools performed their own original poetry to an audience of their peers at Teaching Matters’ 3rd Annual Spoken Word Event !

Students performed in breakout rooms and finalists took the stage at the  92nd Street Y (see photos!).

Follow the journey of one of our finalists Aline, thanks to the quick video skills of our high school event volunteers.

Her passionate performance of  “Betrayer” took her through to the final six!  Students and teachers alike gave rave reviews to finalists and to our master guest poet Kahlil Almustafa.

Other finalists performances include:

• Bronx Early College Academy: Jonathan Goins – “I’ll tell Em”
• IS281: Kamal Abdelrahman  -“Basketball Is Me”
• Ryan Middle School: Eden Takhalov -“I am like…”
• IS129: Aline Dipoumbi -“Betrayer”
• PS/MS004: Yelena Marmol-“Daughter to Mother”
• Academy for Scholarship and Entrepreneurship: -Sterling Peguro “Patriot”

Writing Matters introduces 5th through 9th grade teachers to powerful new ways to approach writing instruction using 21st Century technology tools.  Created by Teaching Matters, Writing Matters offers a private, safe, free ezine space for classrooms to publish and share their work.  Check out thousands of classrooms from 40 states publishing online!    .

Civic Activists for a Digital Age

HUNDREDS of New York students made their voices heard on critical social issues of the day spanning child labor to racial profiling as part of the Voices and Choices program with Teaching Matters!

Speaker Quinn Presenting to Students AND Students Workshopping Social Justice Campaigns with Real NYC Social Activitists

With over 50 schools participating, students met with  policy makers, the business community, and civic activists to present and improve their campaigns for social justice!

Speaker Quinn urged hundreds of 8th graders and their teachers to continue their work in social justice just as she has been doing in the council for years. The students, who researched and prepared unique web-campaigns on civil rights movements presented them to activitists from the NYCLU, Lambda Legal, The Anti-Defamation League, The National Organization for Women, Ensaaf, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn and other organizations focused on social change.

An activist responds to a student presentation at the Civil Rights Summit

Students based their web-campaigns on a six-week study of historical Civil Rights Movements and then applied what they learned to advocate for a current day issue learning that history will and does repeat itself UNLESS YOU WORK FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE.  

Meanwhile at the New York Historical Society, seventh graders from all five boroughs offered persuasive testimony to citizen volunteers from the Goldman Sachs Community Teamworks program on constitutional issues such as: Gun Control, the Death Penalty, Subway Searches, Student Free Speech and Religion and Science. Citizen judges selected the most effective presentations from IS 216 in Queens, the Professional Performing Arts School, the Icahn Charter school and IS 234 in Brooklyn and the crowd then gathered to learn tips on what it takes to really persuade an audience. These groups all blew away the judges and the crowd.  At the end, a crowd of over two hundred students left the event with a new (or renewed) appreciation for the power of democracy, chanting, “We the people…”  (And you thought middle schoolers today were jaded… )

How Did This Happen?

For the last eight years, Voices and Choices, a program run by Teaching Matters, has supported thousands of teachers to rethink the teaching of civics for the digital age. In our newly empowered schools (where many say testing rules the day) we help teachers bring  social studies  alive.   And the kids get savvier each year as they learn to research and make their cases on the most important issues of the day. 

Why Civics Matters at Teaching Matters

Technology is rapidly innovating how we communicate, collaborate and participate in our society. We don’t teach technology, we teach the new (and many tried and true) critical thinking skills that technology is making more relevant and more significant than ever before. In fact, we think we helped elect Obama. After all, we were teaching eighth graders how to use the Internet for civics in 1998 …. so guess how old those kids were in 2008?

Donate!

Seriously. Help us keep this program going!  Private donations like yours make this possible.  Your donations go directly to programs and events for NYC students like the one above.

What if You Faced Virtual Students BEFORE You Took the Job

I had been waiting for someone to invent this. Simulations of some pretty challenging students to test the mettle and prepare pre-service educators. This video below says it all. It appears to be a pretty expensive model of teacher development, but the cost of figuring our classroom management on simulated students, not real ones, might be a few extra points on the ELA or Math tests. And we know that counts for quite a bit these days.

Fostering Creativity in Education

In a recent post, “Remixing Culture and 21st Century Skills,” we discussed the difficult balancing act teachers have between helping students learn today’s essential skills and teaching new skills required for future success. Our Creative Director Carl Potts, expands on these ideas to discuss how creative thinking can be fostered in our students.

Creative thinking is vital to student success in all subject areas. To prepare students for future success – in and beyond the classroom – they need to have techniques that foster creative innovation.

As educator, author and creativity expert Ken Robinson points out, we don’t even know what the world will be like in 5 years, yet our schools are now teaching kids who will be expected to work productively for forty or more years from now. The education we give kids today can’t possibly anticipate the information and skills they will need years down the road. However, if they have the tools to be creative and to innovate, they will have a much better chance of succeeding no matter how the world changes.

Here is a link to a great video presentation, “Do Schools Kill Creativity” that Robinson gave at a TED conference. Other Robinson videos can be seen on YouTube. I also recommend his book Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative. …and just what exactly is creativity?

Based on the research I’ve done so far, here are some things that can be said about the slippery subject of creativity

• Creativity is not a talent; it is a way of operating and it can be taught.
• It is not restricted to the arts and it can be applied to any human endeavor.
• It is not related to IQ (providing you have a minimum level of IQ).
• To get into a creative mood, creative people often get into a “playful mood” to explore ideas for enjoyment.
• One of the best combinations of environment and attitude to foster creative thinking is a quiet space and enough time to get into the proper “playful” and non-judgmental frame of mind. However, these conditions are not practical to use in a classroom environment.
• Although it’s not appropriate for use in the classroom, in some cases, extreme pressure can create an environment where creativity springs to life. As NBC/Universal Vice President Marc Siry stated, “Creativity often involves connecting previously unrelated concepts, techniques, methods, or ideas, and coming up with an unexpected result. These types of connections happen best in an unstructured environment – which is why it’s tough for a big, mature company, laden with process, to be creative. It’s also why creativity often happens under pressure – when the rules go out the window, previously unthinkable connections can be made.”
• Creativity is not the exclusive domain of the young. As Siry notes, it is often implied “that creativity is the province of the young – new ideas are more easily born in a mind free of learned behaviors. The inverse of that could be argued – with more total information in a person’s head, there’s more opportunity for new connections.”
• Creativity and humor are linked. The way seemingly dissimilar ideas come together when brainstorming is similar to the way a punch line works in a joke. The humor in a punch line is often derived by shifting to a different frame of reference when coming to the end of a train of connected thoughts or events in a joke. You laugh at the movement of contact/juxtaposition between two frames of reference.
• Mistakes are a vital part of the learning process. As a British proverb states: The man who does not make mistakes is unlikely to make anything.

Creativity in the classroom

At Teaching Matters, we often incorporate creative exercises into our programs in the form of brainstorming. Brainstorming can be an individual or group activity.

For group brainstorming to work well in the classroom environment, it’s vital to create a climate where students are not tied to, or judged by, the ideas they throw out off the top of their heads.

Students have to feel free to contribute without fear of being judged negatively by their peers or the teacher. You never know what may turn out to be a constructive contribution. Seemingly ridiculous thoughts may spark a chain reaction that leads to a creative solution or innovation.

So, teachers have to establish a non-judgmental climate. Hopefully, a non-judgmental brainstorming culture will eventually be established in the classroom and the need for teacher reinforcement of that attitude will be minimized.

Ideally, I’d like to put together a group of tools/techniques that enable students in an often boisterous classroom environment to be more creative and innovate across a wide range of subjects and endeavors. I’d also like to be able to measure the effects of adding creativity fostering techniques to various subjects. (That will be no easy feat!)

Any thoughts or ideas you have along these lines will be greatly appreciated.

The Innovation Conversation Poised to Change the Education Debate

For those interested in education innovation made possible by technology you must read Bill Tucker’s new  report  – Beyond the Bubble: Technology and the Future of Student Assessment.  Bill is reframing the debate between  two key education camps. 

Bill’s key idea is that, ultimately, we don’t have to choose between accountability systems and   instruction that addresses a broad array of skills and deep content.    Because whether you are Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, or Linda Darling Hammond, you have common ground on one thing. .. our assessments can be radically improved.     

Over the last eight years,  education  took major  steps towards holding schools accountable and measuring their progress.   But our actual assessments, for the most part, took a few steps back. We automated the most basic forms of assessment, and states stopped experiments in performance-based assessments designed to measure the higher-order thinking our kids need to succeed in the future.

 Now that the FEDS, the teachers union, and the governors, ALL agree that we need national standards – this conversation about investing seriously in assessment innovation is extremely timely and relevant. My vote for how to use some of this stimulus! 

For more discussion on this issue click here.

New York’s Teacher Data Reports … What are they?

Many teachers in the schools we support received Teacher Data Reports last week. This report is a DOE initiative to give teachers and school administrators information about the individual teacher’s impact on student test scores as compared to their peers.

Reactions on the ground.… Ouch!

To put it plainly … many teachers were really upset.

“There are so many things that a teacher does beyond preparing students to pass a math or reading test that can’t be measured…How can this possibly measure a teacher’s value add!? ” A reaction from one of our own professional developers at Teaching Matters.

But I  find  this report to be pretty complex. So before we reject it, we need to understand what it is and then discuss the merits and the potential improvements.

Teacher Data Report – What does it measure?

In two words.  Teacher Contribution. 

This is an attempt to measure the teacher’s impact on students test scores. It does this by trying to eliminate the effects on test scores caused by  measurable factors that are out of the teacher’s control. For example:

• Student’s prior year reading and math scores, attendance, free lunch status, race, special ed status
• Unusual items like “student is new to school”
• And even something called “classroom effects” like the “percentage of class who attended summer school” or “percentage retained”

The report predicts what test scores a student is likely to receive given all these effects by  using ten years worth of historical data. For example, Jenny with this history and within this classroom would be predicted to get the following score _______.

Then, it compares the score Jenny actually received with the predicted score. The difference is called the Teacher Contribution.

Predicted score + Teacher contribution = Actual Test score

The teacher’s contribution is then calculated for all students and compared to other similar teachers (same number of years of experience teaching the same subject). You are provided the following data. Compared to your peers are you in the top 20%, or in the middle at 60 % or in the bottom 30% of teacher contribution.

Why is the DOE doing this?

Research has now proven that teachers have a significant impact on how well students actually do on tests. Ironic, because many teachers feel the test doesn’t capture what students are learning in their classrooms, but actually the tests do capture the fact that teaching and teachers really matter most to student learning and performance on tests. So while teachers may feel the tests don’t adequately measure what you teach, they do capture that the teacher has a big impact on student performance. In fact, the difference between the lowest and highest performing teachers (measured by tests) is almost entire grade level of movement. Students move only half a year versus 1.5 years.

So teacher impact is important, yet there are few easy, reliable measures of teacher quality available.
New York is trying to be a thought leader in developing these metrics.

Couple of Questions …

So if I may, I would like to ask a couple of questions .

To move to teacher value ad assessments shouldn’t we move to testing system that occurs at the end of the cycle with the same teacher? Now, we know many teachers are drilling  the first part of the year and “teaching” the second part. What if they could really plan for the test over the course of an entire year …   and then be measured on their success.

Is it likely that teachers of students with mostly threes and fours on the test will find it difficult to make that top 20 %. Might these teachers find their “teacher contribution” is not showing up. If children can read adequately, teachers should be spending time more on higher order skills that are not currently measured by the test than worrying about moving high 3s to 4s on a test of reading.  (That is my view anyway.)

Will teachers who spend time working to impact those factors “outside of their control” – get penalized by this model? Remember, the goal was to eliminate the impact of factors outside a teacher’s control from the calculation of teacher contribution. Of course higher attendance will increase performance, but it will also raise the bar for what the student needs to achieve if a teacher successfully raises attendence.  Just a thought. Maybe that is not significant.

The data also breaks down performance by subgroups. How does this work if a teacher has only a few students in a particular group?  Is the data reliable?  I am hoping someone more statistically inclined can speak to that and help me better understand the issues here.

A final thought….

No one should look at data without first getting their own assumptions on the table first. If you as a principal find that you were not able to accurately predict your teachers ranking… all you have learned is that you need a lot more information.

Maybe you haven’t had time to visit the classroom or look at the student work being produced in it this year …   maybe that is part of the problem. 

What you do you think about this initiative?  What are the potential benefits and/or pitfalls for our students?