Education Week published a ton of resources about teacher professional development resources this week. I’m sure they’re worth reviewing (and I’ll be checking them out later this weekend), but want to share here the story Stephen Sawchuk uses to introduce the report:
A man dies and goes to heaven. Passing the pearly gates, he notices that there are plenty of folks from all professions and walks of life standing around, but no teachers.
“Where are all the teachers?” he inquires of God.
“Oh, they’re in professional development,” God replies. “In hell.”
Unfortunately, this is an all-to-common experience of teachers.
Fortunately, at our school, we’re lucky enough to have our needed professional development support identified by teachers with administrators. It’s not done “to” us. That’s why we work so closely with the California Writing Project, Kelly Young at Pebble Creek Labs, and spend a lot of time working collaboratively ourselves.
ideaCity, also known as ‘Canada’s Premiere Meeting of the Minds’, is an eclectic gathering of artists, adventurers, authors, cosmologists, doctors, designers, entertainers, filmmakers, inventors, magicians, musicians, scientists and technologists. Fifty of the planet’s brightest minds converge on Toronto each June to speak to a highly engaged audience.
I’ll be a guest on the Seedlings show at Ed Tech Talk this Thursday night at 7:30 PM Eastern Standard Time. You can listen to it and participate in a “back channel” chat room at their website.
I’ll be posting the 2010 edition of The Best Web 2.0 Applications for Education on Wednesday, so we’ll be talking about that and plenty of other ed stuff. It will be broadcast live and later turned into a podcast.
Thanks to Cheryl Oakes, Bob Sprankle and Alice Barr for inviting me!
It’s a fairly extensive piece on Rosalinda B. Barrera, the new director of the U.S. Department of Education’s office of English-language acquisition. It sounds like a lot of that office’s power has been taken away, but it’s still a useful article.
I thought readers might find it useful if I brought together my choices for The Best Posts On Building Parent Engagement In Schools during this past year.
You might also be interested in last year’s edition:
What Cathie Black’s resignation means for school reform is the title of Valerie Strauss’ latest piece in the Washington Post. Black, of course, is the publisher who had zero experience with public schools when she was appointed by New York City Mayor Bloomberg as head of the New York schools a few months ago. She resigned today.
The Drucker Institute also had a short post about the departure of Cathie Black from the New York Schools. They suggested that Mayor Bloomberg might have made a better decision if he had seen a short animation the Institute created on the importance of “domain knowledge” prior to her appointment. It’s a similar position many of us have made about the importance of having experienced educators as Superintendents. The film makes some good points, though, after the recent revelation that GE didn’t pay any taxes last year, I wish it didn’t point to Jeffrey R. Immelt from GE as such a model person.
As most of this blog’s readers know, Joel Klein has become the third big-city school superintendent to resign in the past month) Michelle Rhee and the Superintendent of Chicago Schools were the two others). Klein is leaving his position as head of the New York School District.
Amazingly, Mayor Bloomberg has proposed replacing him with Cathleen Black, a publishing executive with no prior experience in education and who sends her children to private schools.
There have been an enormous number of articles and blog posts written about this — in my opinion — absurd move by the mayor. I read a lot, but even I have been intimidated by their quantity. I’ve created this “The Best…” list, though, because I believe the issue of placing people with no experience in the classroom in charge of our schools (beginning with Education Secretary Arne Duncan) is a critical one.
In this list, I’ve tried to include blog posts and articles that speak more broadly to that concern, and that are less focused on New York only (though I have included some of them for background.
Since I know I’ve missed good posts and articles, please leave them in the comments section.
Here are my picks — so far — for The Best Blog Posts & Articles About Joel Klein’s Departure & The Question Of Who Should Be Leading Our Schools:
Coincidentally, the week before Klein’s departure, I wrote a post about this very same issue — This Is A Great Explanation Of One Of My Biggest Concerns About “School Reformers.” It primarily discusses an excellent article that had appeared in Forbes and how it related to my concern about non-educators being in put in charge of schools. And, no, I’m not clairvoyant…
The corporate takeover of American schools is an article appearing in the British Guardian newspaper, and it’s one of the best pieces on school policy that I’ve read all year. Its subtitle is “The trend for appointing CEOs to the top jobs is symptomatic of a declining commitment to public education and social justice.”
I send-out a free monthly newsletter for people who just want to get my choices for the best posts of each month. I hadn’t really thought much about the value of monthly newsletters until I read an interesting post today in TechCrunch about a new super-simple application that lets you create email newsletters called TinyLetter. Here’s an excerpt describing the advantages of an email newsletter:
… if you don’t blog daily, you won’t build an audience, but email newsletters can be sent out weekly and have a built in audience. And people check their email everyday. And people can reply to emails…
That all makes sense to me.
So, given that, I thought I’d write a short “The Best…” list sharing some easy and free ways to create your own email newsletter.
Here are my choices for The Best Applications For Creating Free Email Newsletters:
Teacher Dan Brown (who writes a must-read blog) has created an animation of a “fake” interview with Cathie Black, the newly nominated Chancellor of New York Schools. It includes some real quotes from her, along with ones he “made up.”
Phile is a new web application that lets you create your own social network site that can be open to the public or private.
They say its purpose is to “create a lasting body of knowledge just by talking about the things you love,” but that just seems to be a fancy way of saying its a place to create a social network. Perhaps I’m missing something?
