Unfortunately, there were many disasters — both natural and human-made — in 2010. Some, like the trapped Chilean miners, had good endings. Most, however, did not.
Here are The Best “The Best…” Lists About Disasters — 2010:
I’m beginning my annual “The Best…” list highlighting “year in review” images. There aren’t a whole lot right now on the date of this post, but they’ll soon be coming out of the woodwork. I figured it would be helpful for teachers to get access to at least some of them prior to Winter Break.
Looking Back at 2010: Teaching Ideas is a very nice piece from The New York Times Learning Network. It suggests a number of ways to use “year in review” features.
These kinds of games are great tools for Beginning English Language Learners to acquire vocabulary. Even though the book isn’t interactive, it could certainly be projected on a whiteboard and students could circle the objects with a marker (of course, if you had a hard copy of it you could do the same on a document camera).
I thought readers might find it useful for me to list in one post some useful (at least in mind ) pieces I’ve written about my own teaching practice over the past year. It was certainly a helpful exercise for me to review them.
There are some posts that could have been included here, but, instead, I’ve decided to add them to a future post titled “The Best Articles (And Blog Posts) Offering Practical Advice To Teachers — 2010.”
Most of the titles are self-explanatory.
You might also be interested in last year’s edition:
Here are my choices for The Best Reflective Posts I’ve Written About My Teaching Practice — 2010 (not in any order of preference or, in fact, not in any order at all:
Here’s an excerpt of a conversation with a Shanghai principal:
“Developed countries like the U.S. shouldn’t be too surprised by these results. They’re just one index, one measure that shows off the good points of Shanghai’s and China’s education system. But the results can’t cover up our problems,” he says. Liu is very frank about those problems — the continuing reliance on rote learning, the lack of analysis or critical thinking — and he says the system is in dire need of reform. “Why don’t Chinese students dare to think? Because we insist on telling them everything. We’re not getting our kids to go and find things out for themselves,” he says.
As well as the limitations of the Chinese education system, Liu says, it was only students in Shanghai who took the PISA tests, and Shanghai has some of the best schools in China.
I have no idea how Alexander Russo found this post, but it’s a good one. It’s titled The amazing truth about PISA scores: USA beats Western Europe, ties with Asia, and offers a great analysis of the recent PISA scores. The blog which published it says it gives “Kurdish-Swedish perspectives on the American Economy.” It’s statistical analysis may be the best I’ve seen anywhere. However, I can’t say the same for its perspective on U.S. politics and education policy, which is a bit strange. But that part is only a very small portion of the post.
The Shanghai students performed well, experts say, for the same reason students from other parts of Asia — including South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong — do: Their education systems are steeped in discipline, rote learning and obsessive test preparation.
Yup, just want we want to do here, right?
The Test Chinese Schools Still Fail is the headline of an excellent column in the Wall Street Journal written by a principal of a Chinese high school. Here’s an excerpt:
“…using tests to structure schooling is a mistake. Students lose their innate inquisitiveness and imagination, and become insecure and amoral in the pursuit of high scores.”
The results of the Program for International Student Assessment showed that our students actually placed No. 1 when they were compared with students at schools abroad having similar poverty rates. To wit: schools in the U.S. with less than a 10 percent poverty rate posted a score of 551. Finland, which is widely acknowledged to have the world’s best schools, came in No. 2 at 536. Even when the poverty rate was as high as 24.9 percent, the U.S. held its top-rated position with a score of 527.
And, speaking of PISA, if you ever wanted to to know what it is, here’s an engaging video describing it:
I decided my lack of a year-end health list was an oversight worth correcting this year. So here are my choices for The Best Health Sites — 2010 (not in any order of preference):
State Health Stats is an amazing interactive infographic showing many health statistics about the fifty states. It’s very accessible.
The History of Vaccines is a lively interactive from The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. It has an interactive timeline that would be accessible to English Language Learners and online activities that are probably only accessible to advanced ELL’s.
Lunch Line Redesign is a New York Times interactive that highlights ways that school cafeterias are using to encourage students to eat more healthy foods. It’s really quite interesting, and I think it could be a great discussion starter with students.
Better Health Conversation is an interactive from Web MD and General Electric that helps you prepare for your next doctor’s visit. It’s accessible and engaging.
Disney’s Healthy Kids site provides a lot of good information on healthy nutrition in a way accessible to English Language Learners. It’s quite interactive with games and animations, and appears to be free of advertising.
CVS Pharmacy has a pretty impressive multimedia collection of health resources. There are three sections on the site — animations, multimedia, and audio. The animations are engaging, but the English probably isn’t very accessible to English Language Learners. The multimedia slideshows are also good, and are probably accessible to Intermediate ELL’s. Their audio reports are the best resources on the site for ELL’s — they’re short reports with audio support for the text.
Quite a few other resources can be found in “The Best…” lists I mentioned at the top of this post.
Looking Beyond the Simple School Fix is the title of my newest article in Teacher Magazine (you have to register to read the entire article, but it’s free and takes seconds to do so).
Getting Teacher Assessment Right: What Policymakers Can Learn From Researchis the title of what looks like a good new report from the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado. I have to admit I’ve only had a chance to skim it, but it appears to have a lot of wisdom.
Here’s how they describe it:
….teachers’ effectiveness and quality can and should be evaluated, but sensible and useful evaluation depends on a balanced system where value-added models using student standardized test scores play only a limited role.
According to the NEPC research review prepared by Pennsylvania State University professor of education Patricia Hinchey, supporting and sustaining high-quality teaching depends on combining many sources of valuable information. The brief describes several different teacher evaluation methods and explains that no single method of teacher evaluation is sufficient by itself. Each has weaknesses that can be compensated for when combined with others. These methods include:
Classroom observations and evaluations by administrators
Portfolios prepared by teachers that document a range of teaching behaviors and responsibilities; and
Peer review
“Even after a decade of seeing the damage done by the No Child Left Behind Act, policymakers are still fetishizing student scores on standardized tests, using them as a crutch instead of turning to balanced, sensible solutions to teacher evaluation,” notes Kevin G. Welner, Director of NEPC. “This report offers a clear alternative, identifying a wide range of credible research documenting useful criteria for assessing teacher quality and supporting and sustaining high-quality teaching.”
I’ve previously posted about a study that showed students were more likely to be successful in tasks if they were described as “fun” (see Framing A Lesson As “Fun”). In that same post, I talked about how I describe various learning activities as “puzzles” when I introduce them to the class.
In a just completed study, researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine.
“What we think is happening,” said Mark Beeman, a neuroscientist who conducted the study with Karuna Subramaniam, a graduate student, “is that the humor, this positive mood, is lowering the brain’s threshold for detecting weaker or more remote connections” to solve puzzles.
It’s an interesting connection to that earlier study, and may help explain its conclusions.
I don’t really want to take the space up here to describe the experiment (you can go to the link to learn more) because it’s a little complicated. However, it shows what good teachers already know — that the more control students have over their learning, the more they will actually learn.
It gets down to creating opportunities for students to make choices — ranging from having them decided what categories they would use in a data set as along as they provide evidence that backs them up, to deciding exactly what their graphic organizers look like, to exactly how they can make presentations.
Of course, we’re not “potted plants” and we have to help guide these choices with sufficient scaffolding to maximize their odds of success….
The History of Vaccines is a lively interactive from The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. It has an interactive timeline that would be accessible to English Language Learners and online activities that are probably only accessible to advanced ELL’s.
Today, in Newsweek (she was also on Oprah, but I didn’t see it — I assume she communicated a similar message) she upped that arrogance level to new heights. Not only did she portray her new organization as the one true one to “defend and promote the interests of children,” she also did not stop at attacking teacher unions as the primary obstacle to change. No, now she’s also attacking school boards,too:
“…school boards… are beholden to special interests [and] have created a bureaucracy that is focused on the adults instead of the students. Go to any public-school-board meeting in the country and you’ll rarely hear the words “children,” “students,” or “kids” uttered. Instead, the focus remains on what jobs, contracts, and departments are getting which cuts, additions, or changes. The rationale for the decisions mostly rests on which grown-ups will be affected, instead of what will benefit or harm children.”
I don’t know about you, but in my experience the vast majority of school board members are committed to making schools the best place they can be for children and spend countless volunteer hours focusing on…children.
Rhee’s list of people she thinks are most concerned about the needs of children is getting smaller and smaller…
) pieces I’ve written about my own teaching practice over the past year. It was certainly a helpful exercise for me to review them.