KATE, the Kentucky Academy of Technology Education, collects the most innovative and successful technology practices in K–12 education and makes them available to the teachers and students of Kentucky — the United States — and the world.
It provides some good information that I plan to include in test-taking advice I give to my students before our state testing begins. It provides evidence to the common sense view that if you’re facing an extended task, it’s good to take a short break once in awhile. Those breaks can help you concentrate when you return to the task.
Here’s what one of the researchers says:
This study is consistent with the idea that the brain is built to detect and respond to change, Lleras said, and suggests that prolonged attention to a single task actually hinders performance.
“We propose that deactivating and reactivating your goals allows you to stay focused,” he said. “From a practical standpoint, our research suggests that, when faced with long tasks (such as studying before a final exam or doing your taxes), it is best to impose brief breaks on yourself. Brief mental breaks will actually help you stay focused on your task!”
I’ve always suggested that students should periodically take breaks of a minute or two throughout the test, and now I’ve got a study to back up that advice.
The attacks on teachers and other public sector workers in Wisconsin by Governor Scott Walker and his allies could be a dangerous sign of things to come throughout the United States. Fortunately, the courageous and well-organized opposition could be an even more powerful indicator for the future.
I have a particular interest in what happens in Wisconsin — beyond its national implications. I lived in Milwaukee from age ten to fifteen, and know first-hand, and fondly remember, the hard work of educators in that state.
I hope readers will provide additional suggestions for this list — I’m sure there are plenty of good articles I don’t know about.
Here are my choices for The Best Resources For Learning About Attacks On Teachers & Other Public Sector Workers In Wisconsin:
Here’s a video of firefighters — who are exempted from the changes proposed by Gov. Walker — marching into the state capitol playing bagpipes to support the protest by teachers and other public sector employees:
Kennedy (head of the Wisconsin affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers) blamed Walker for refusing to meet with union representatives.
“We are willing to come to the table and negotiate,” Kennedy said. “He is the one not willing to come to the table. He wants to strip our rights and then dictate exactly what the terms and conditions of employment are.”
Wisconsin Assistant Senate Majority Leader Glenn Grothman, a Republican, said Walker shouldn’t have to negotiate.
That exchange says it all…
Why should an elected official talk with constituencies who will be adversely affected by his plans?
Here’s an MSNBC video saying that 70,000 people attended Saturday’s protest against Gov. Walker’s plan to end collective bargaining. Other media outlets estimate the total was closer to 100,000.
Alice Mercer posts What’s up Wisconsin?, which gives her perspective and tells about a support vigil that will be happening here in Sacramento on Tuesday.
Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, R-Horicon, responded by saying that he started early because “Honestly, I thought you guys weren’t showing up.”
Fitzgerald acknowledged that Barca was correct in his reading of the rules, and members allowed the bill to return to its amendable stage. Fitzgerald then moved to adjourn the Assembly until 10 a.m. Tuesday, prompting a standing ovation from Democrats, who promised to continue working on amendments to the bill.
As many people know, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated while supporting workers who were striking in Memphis, Tennessee. He was a strong supporter of organized labor. Here is one of his statements that I think indicate clearly what his position would be on what is happening in Wisconsin today:
“Negroes in the United States read the history of labor and find it mirrors their own experience. We are confronted by powerful forces telling us to rely on the goodwill and understanding of those who profit by exploiting us. They deplore our discontent, they resent our will to organize, so that we may guarantee that humanity will prevail and equality will be exacted. They are shocked that action organizations, sit-ins, civil disobedience and protests are becoming our everyday tools, just as strikes, demonstrations and union organization became yours to insure that bargaining power genuinely existed on both sides of the table.
“We want to rely upon the goodwill of those who oppose us. Indeed, we have brought forward the method of nonviolence to give an example of unilateral goodwill in an effort to evoke it in those who have not yet felt it in their hearts. But we know that if we are not simultaneously organizing our strength we will have no means to move forward. If we do not advance, the crushing burden of centuries of neglect and economic deprivation will destroy our will, our spirits and our hope. In this way, labor’s historic tradition of moving forward to create vital people as consumers and citizens has become our own tradition, and for the same reasons.”
—Speaking to the AFL-CIO on Dec. 11, 1961
Wisconsin Power Play by Paul Krugman at the New York Times may be the best piece that’s been written about what’s happening in Wisconsin.
I’m going to print an excerpt here, but you’re making a mistake if you don’t read his entire post:
There’s only been one scholarly effort to tackle this problem that I’m aware of. Back in 2000, three professors writing in the Harvard Educational Review did a statistical analysis of state SAT/ACT scores, controlling for factors like race, median income, and parental education. They found that the presence of teachers unions in a state did have a measurable and significant correlation with increased test scores — that going to school in a union state would, for instance, raise average SATs by about 50 points.
Two other findings leap out from the Harvard Educational Review study. First, they concluded that Southern states’ poor academic performance could be explained almost entirely by that region’s lack of unionization, even when you didn’t take socioeconomic differences into account.
And second, and to my mind far more interesting, they found that concrete improvements in the educational environment associated with teachers’ unions — lower class sizes, higher state spending on education, bigger teacher salaries — accounted for very little of the union/non-union variation. Teachers’ unions, in other words, don’t just help students by reducing class sizes or increasing educational spending. In their conclusion, they stated that
“other mechanism(s) (ie, better working conditions; greater worker autonomy, security, and dignity; improved administration; better training of teachers; greater levels of faculty professionalism) must be at work here.”
Alice Mercer and I, along with many others, attended a rally at the California State Capitol in Sacramento tonight in support of the Wisconsin unions.
Here are some photos from the rally. The first two, which show me and others, were taken by Alice. You’ll see a picture of her in there, too. The presentation is a little strange — I’m trying out a new tool I haven’t used before (you can find a better slideshow at REAL Teachers):
“A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows the public strongly supports employee bargaining rights. In the survey, 61% oppose a law in their state similar to one being considered in Wisconsin, compared with 33% who favor it.”
Here’s an excerpt from that NPR segment, which points out the impact of eliminating collective bargaining:
Mary Bell, head of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, says her members use collective bargaining to speak up on behalf of students. She says WEAC members weigh in on a whole host of education issues, such as “what the parameters are when you need to speak up on behalf of a student [and] what your voice is in setting curriculum.”
The state Assembly just passed the bill eliminating collective bargaining. You can read about what happened in this New York Times article, and see what happened in this video after Republicans cut-off debate, even though many Democrats were still waiting to speak:
The most interesting information today, I think, is a few seconds of the following embedded video from tonight’s PBS News Hour. Columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks have a segment every Friday. There’s nothing exceptional about this one until you get to the 5:45 minute mark. Then, Shields points out that there are nine states that have no collective bargaining, and that those nine states have a “higher indebtedness” than the states who do have collective bargaining. Brooks agrees with him. I wasn’t aware of that statistic, and it certainly raises more questions about the purpose behind the move to eliminate it in Wisconsin and other states — it’s not about money, it’s about power. (There might be a problem with PBS’ embed code — you can also access the video here)
“I’ve talked to many teachers and public works employees in my county,” he said, “and almost every conversation comes around to the impact on their seniority and their concerns that their boss doesn’t like them and they won’t be treated fairly, and frankly I think there’s something to that.”
“Your actions are disgraceful” is what some of their Democratic legislative colleagues tell Republican Senators who leave after voting to end collective bargaining for public sector employees in Wisconsin. Here’s the video:
Wisconsin recalls hit deadline: Where things stand is the headline of a Washington Post headline reporting on the latest news out of the campaign by teachers and other public workers. And things are really looking interesting…
Lorna Costantini, the primary organizer behind the great blog and webcast series “Parents As Partners,” has graciously invited me to be the guest on their webcast this coming Monday.
In addition, I’ll give a preview of two articles I’ve written that will be appearing in April — one for Teacher Magazine on what Star Wars’ Princess Leia can teach us about parent engagement (I kid you not ) and another on the differences between parent engagement and parent involvement for ASCD’s Educational Leadership.
Plus, we can talk about any other related issues participants would like to discuss.
Date: Monday February 21, 2011 Time: 9:00 PM EST (6:00 PM Pacific Time)
The National Education Policy Center released a report earlier this month critiquing the flawed L.A. Times project publicizing supposed “value-added” scores of local teachers, which the Times then misrepresented as supporting their methodology (you can read all about it at The Best Posts About The LA Times Article On “Value-Added” Teacher Ratings).
Today, after continued misrepresentations from The Times, the Policy Center released what I can only describe as a devastating rebuke to the reporters. After reading it, I can’t imagine that anybody would have any faith left in the paper’s objectivity, and it certainly raises many questions of it’s integrity.
In 2011, February l7th “is observed as the Lantern Festival – the 15th and final day of Chinese Lunar New Year festivities. The holiday is the most important annual celebration in China, when the nation largely shuts down as families gather together for reunions and feasts. More than 2.5 billion passenger trips by air, rail, bus or sea are taken around the holiday, according to the Chinese government. The Lantern Festival, or Yuan Xiao Jie, will complete the welcoming of the Year of the Rabbit – from the Chinese zodiac, indicating a year of caution and calm, with a quiet underlying strength and determination.”
I cringed at the cheap insinuation that the Colorado study is influenced by the source of some of its funding. Shall we consider the vested interest of Mr. Lauter, Mr. Felch, etc. in this project? Or the fact that Thomas Kane, who Mr. Lauter approvingly quotes, is a high-level official at the Gates Foundation, overseeing a project which has invested heavily in Value-Added methods? The point is that there are all kinds of personal, professional, and institutional investments in this debate, so if you’re going to lay them out, lay them all out. And if you suspect a biasing influence, do the reporter’s job of demonstrating it.
But the big, big question for me is how is it that this newspaper moved so strongly toward advocating a particular technology in school reform? The Times is not just editorializing that we need reform, but within its news department is taking a side on a technique. The paper is no longer reporting the news, but creating it and spinning it.
TED Talks, the famous site/meeting that invites notable thinkers and doers to speak and then shares their talks online, has just created a new feature called TED Conversations.
You can read more about how they describe it here. In many ways, it’s just another social network that it appears like every organization is starting these days. However, the key difference is that it appears that at least some TED speakers are participating in the conversations. If that continues on a serious level, then TED Conversations is going to become very popular, very quickly, and be very useful.
Slideshare, the popular online slideshow site, just added a new feature called Zipcast. With a simple click, it allows you to create a public or private video and text chat next to the slideshare presentation you’re viewing.
Richard Byrne has done it again, finding another online tool that has a lot of potential.
Little Bird Tales lets you easily make slideshows where you can add text and, more importantly for English Language Learners, provide an audio narration. On nice touch is that you can virtually paint/draw artwork in addition to uploading images (unfortunately, the site doesn’t have the ability to grab photos off the web by url addresses). It’s free to use, but I’m unclear on if there will be an eventual cost to use the site. It appears to have an upper limit on the number of shows you can produce.
I’m preparing a series of lessons for my Intermediate English students highlighting the advantages to being bilingual (I’ll share them here once they’re done). I think they’ll provide some good positive reinforcement. I thought readers might find it useful to see the few resources I’ve identified, and hope you can suggest others.
In a related issue,e very so often I’ll have a student who says they’re not very interested in learning English because they’re going back to Mexico as soon as possible. My usual response, which has been pretty effective, is that the student is likely to get a better-paying job there if he/she knows English, too. That position makes sense to me and, usually, to the student, who then tends to become more serious about learning English. I have gotten anecdotal evidence from English teachers in Mexico that this statement is true, but had never been able to find any concrete evidence to back it up.
Languages smarten up your brain is the title of a column in the Guardian Weekly. It’s a summary of a report detailing research results that show learning a second language contributes to improved problem-solving and decision-making abilities, among other advantages. The full report can be found here.
Another study of bilingual people carried out by Judith Kroll, a psychologist at Penn State University, supported the idea that speaking more than one language keeps the brain in shape and bolsters mental function. She found that bilingual speakers could outperform single-language speakers in mental tasks such as editing out irrelevant information and focusing on important details. Bilinguals were also better at prioritising and multi-tasking, she said.
“We would probably refer to most of these cognitive advantages as multi-tasking,” said Kroll. “Bilinguals seem to be better at this type of perspective-taking.”
Feedblitz is acting up a bit again, which means that if you subscribe to this blog by email you’re not necessarily receiving all the posts I’m writing. This seems to happen now and again for a short time, and then it starts working fine again. For example, even though there were ten new posts on Monday, Feedblitz only sent out the last five.
So, if you are an email subscriber, you might want to come directly to the blog now and then to check-out what you might have missed.
Everything is working fine for those who use an RSS Reader to subscribe…
) and another on the differences between parent engagement and parent involvement for ASCD’s Educational Leadership.
