Michelle Rhee was on The Daily Show last night. I thought she generally came across as quite reasonable and tried to minimize and gloss over many of her beliefs. Stewart kept pressing her — admirably, I thought, while trying to maintain his nice guy persona — and the best part is clearly Part Three (the second and third parts appeared on the Web). That’s when Rhee told Stewart “You’re looking confused” when it was clear that Stewart had enough of her ducking and weaving, and he began to question her more forcefully.
I was struck by several things Stewart said during the interview, including:
teaching is an art form
teachers subjected to new offensive coordinator coming in every few years
There hasn’t really been any innovation in education since John Dewey. (this is the only time I thought he was off-base)
Teachers seem like one tool to get education on track, but they seem to be the only tool that ever gets yelled at…. There’s poverty, communities, but teachers are the only ones we tell, “Fix it, or you’re fired!”
Education can take place if the soil is fertile..
Is school the biggest factor?
It seems we’ve abandoned the model of public school in the inner city
You are creating a system where the public school becomes a place for the toughest cases [and others go to charters]
The systemic issues that are the underlying causes of the poor performances never get addressed.
The entire system of standardized tests is somewhat broken.
One of the most important purposes of public education, I believe, is to prepare students to participate in democratic public life. There are many aspects of this kind of activity, including voting.
It does not appear that Florida’s Governor Scott shares my belief in wanting to promote this kind of democratic engagement, however.
His initiative is clearly a thinly veiled effort to discourage Latino voting, as The Daily Show’s episode from last night demonstrates (if you’re reading this on an RSS Readers you may have to click through to see the embedded video):
This reminds me of an incident in my community organizing career when then-California Secretary of State Bill Jones was unhappy with Congresswoman’s Sanchez election victory and began a similar search of voter rolls. Five hundred of our members, led by thirty African-American, Latino, Asia, and white clergy, marched to his office to present him with what we called The Bull Connor Award For Promoting Ethnic Minority Voter Participation. It was a well-produced placard with this image of Bull Connor’s police in Birmingham, Alabama using police dogs to prevent African Americans from registering to vote (among other “offenses”):
He, however, was not aware of the irony, and thought he was getting a serious award. Five minutes before he was scheduled to meet with us, however, one of his staffpeople figured out what was going on and canceled the ceremony.
One week later Jones also canceled his investigation of voter’s citizenship status.
I have an extended lesson plan in my book, Helping Students Motivate Themselves, on helping students learn to take personal responsibility and blame others less.
Today, I got an idea for an addition to those lessons.
First, NPR ran a story titled Partisan Psychology: Why Do People Choose Political Loyalties Over Facts? It discusses a study on cognitive dissonance — holding two conflicting opinions in your head at the same time. Even though the article was talking about it in the context of politics, it certainly happens in the classroom. For example, when a student throws a wad of paper at another student and explains to the teacher that the other student “made him do it” even though the teacher points out that nobody “made him” do it but himself. They have inconsistent ideas in their head.
The NPR article points out a study that found that people tend to have cognitive dissonance because it’s painful for them if they do not. They then found that people were more likely to get past these inconsistencies if they felt more positive about themselves.
So, I’m going to develop an addendum to my lesson on personal responsibility. I’m thinking it might be worth including a short piece on cognitive dissonance where we learn what it is, I share examples from my life, and students share experiences from their own. We can review this study, and I’m hopeful that it might make student more aware of its dangers.
In addition, I’m thinking that this info could be a useful classroom management tool. When, for example, I have a paper wad throwing incident like I share earlier, I wonder what might happen if I asked a student who was reluctant to accept responsibility to take a minute and think about something positive he did in his life?
Coincidentally, Jon Stewart did a piece on cognitive dissonance last night on the Daily Show. There are a couple of inappropriate parts here, but portions of it could be useful in class. Here it is:
Writing it has made me a better teacher for my students, and I hope it’s been helpful to others. It’s been an incredible gift to be able to connect with so many talented educators around the world.
Feedburner, though sometimes erratic, consistently says about 25,000 people subscribe to this blog daily. There’s bound to be overlap, but there are also 2,000 people who receive my monthly newsletter, and fifteen thousand who read it via Twitter, along with others who read it on Facebook and on Google+.
Though “The Best…” lists are clearly extremely popular, some of my non-”The Best…” posts have also rung a chord with readers. Here are some of those most popular ones:
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was interviewed by Jon Stewart last night. One portion aired on television, but it was extended and the majority of it was posted only on the Web. I’ve posted all three parts below. I thought Stewart did a great job of constantly pushing Duncan, and that Duncan constantly demonstrated a text book example of cognitive dissonance — saying one thing but having done another in action. I’ve also embedded a few tweets I sent during the interview with Duncan quotes that struck me.
Duncan on daily show: “we have to stop teaching to the test – I agree”
It publicizes another pretty impressive creation of theirs — My World.
Here are two amazing videos taken from The International Space Station:
Daniel Pink was recently interviewed on a local Washington, D.C. television show along with a local university official. You watch it all here, but I thought the few minutes he spent discussing the role of grades, autonomy and inquiry in education to be particularly thought-provoking. I used Tube Chop to “chop” those two brief segments and have them embedded below. I don’t know if they will come through on an RSS Readers, so you might have to click through to my blog in order to view them.
The creators of those videos have now made some follow-up ones.
The Pirates of The Caribbean video has been shortened, and the sound has been enhanced so it’s easier to hear the words:
And a sequel to the Star Wars one has been made using clips from The Empire Strikes Back:
Dan Ariely has done a lot of research on motivation. Here’s a short video of him talking about pay for performance. I was particularly struck by something he says near the end. He asks if we were going in for surgery, would we want to tell the surgeon that if he/her does his job well we’ll give him a lot of money and if he doesn’t do his job well we’ll sue him, or would we rather have him just concentrate on doing his job?
Perhaps advocates of merit pay for teachers might want to think about that question, too?
If you want to teach the difference between correlation & causation, this could be the video for you…..It could be, that is, if you don’t mind using a beer commercial (Showing amazing stuff to the beer is supposed to make it amazing ):
The PBS News Hour produced this segment on self control and young people. It uses financial literacy as an initial hook, but it’s mainly about the famous marshmallow test and a recent updated study:
If you skip through an off-color remark made by the celery near the beginning of this video, it could be a short and fun way to introduce the idea of personification to students. Check out “Meltdown: Where Last Night’s Leftovers Battle For Their Lives”:
Transocean (greatly responsible for last year’s Gulf Oil Spill) just gave their executives huge bonuses because of their…safety record. Jon Stewart does a great short bit on it. It seems to me this is a good example of either Campbell’s Law, or and example of how incentives don’t work, or both.
Well-known and respected author/researcher David Berliner (I’ve posted about his work several times) gives a very understandable explanation of “Campbell’s Law” in this video. The “law” says:
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor.
It’s an important critique of the use of standardized tests in schools for teacher or student evaluation.
The night Diane Ravitch was the guest on the Daily Show was amazing! Here are three clips from it:
Based on the fact this video has over nine million views on YouTube, I may be the last person who has seen it, but it’s still a great video to get students to think more carefully about their writing:
Every month I make a short list highlighting my choices of the best resources I shared through (and learned from) Twitter, but didn’t necessarily include them in posts here on my blog. Now and then, in order to make it a bit easier for me, I may try to break it up into mid-month and end-of-month lists (and sometimes I’m a bit late).
I’ve already shared in earlier posts several new resources I found on Twitter — and where I gave credit to those from whom I learned about them. Those are not included again in this post.
I usually just do a year-end list of The Best Videos For Educators and many other topics, but it gets a little crazy having to review all of my zillion posts at once. So, to make it easier for me — and perhaps, to make it a little more useful to readers — I’m going to start publishing mid-year lists, too. These won’t be ranked, unlike my year-end “The Best…” lists, and just because a site appears on a mid-year list doesn’t guarantee it will be included in an end-of-the-year one. But, at least, I won’t have to review all my year’s posts in December…
The creators of those videos have now made some follow-up ones.
The Pirates of The Caribbean video has been shortened, and the sound has been enhanced so it’s easier to hear the words:
And a sequel to the Star Wars one has been made using clips from The Empire Strikes Back:
Dan Ariely has done a lot of research on motivation. Here’s a short video of him talking about pay for performance. I was particularly struck by something he says near the end. He asks if we were going in for surgery, would we want to tell the surgeon that if he/her does his job well we’ll give him a lot of money and if he doesn’t do his job well we’ll sue him, or would we rather have him just concentrate on doing his job?
Perhaps advocates of merit pay for teachers might want to think about that question, too?
If you want to teach the difference between correlation & causation, this could be the video for you…..It could be, that is, if you don’t mind using a beer commercial (Showing amazing stuff to the beer is supposed to make it amazing ):
The PBS News Hour produced this segment on self control and young people. It uses financial literacy as an initial hook, but it’s mainly about the famous marshmallow test and a recent updated study:
If you skip through an off-color remark made by the celery near the beginning of this video, it could be a short and fun way to introduce the idea of personification to students. Check out “Meltdown: Where Last Night’s Leftovers Battle For Their Lives”:
Transocean (greatly responsible for last year’s Gulf Oil Spill) just gave their executives huge bonuses because of their…safety record. Jon Stewart does a great short bit on it. It seems to me this is a good example of either Campbell’s Law, or and example of how incentives don’t work, or both.
Well-known and respected author/researcher David Berliner (I’ve posted about his work several times) gives a very understandable explanation of “Campbell’s Law” in this video. The “law” says:
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor.
It’s an important critique of the use of standardized tests in schools for teacher or student evaluation.
The night Diane Ravitch was the guest on the Daily Show was amazing! Here are three clips from it:
Based on the fact this video has over nine million views on YouTube, I may be the last person who has seen it, but it’s still a great video to get students to think more carefully about their writing:
(NOTE: This is the second time I’m publishing this post today. For some weird reason, the first time it was published RSS Feed Readers didn’t pick it up. I know it will look a little strange to have two identical posts showing up on my blog, but I also know that Twitter and Google+ readers have already bookmarked the previous version and I didn’t want to mess them up)
I usually just do a year-end list on this topic and many others, but it gets a little crazy having to review all of my zillion posts at once. So, to make it easier for me — and perhaps, to make it a little more useful to readers — I’m going to start publishing mid-year lists, too. These won’t be ranked, unlike my year-end “The Best…” lists, and just because a site appears on a mid-year list doesn’t guarantee it will be included in an end-of-the-year one (especially since this mid-year list is so long and will have to be trimmed-down). But, at least, I won’t have to review all my year’s posts in December…
You might also be interested in these previous editions:
The Test Generation is an article by Dana Goldstein that was published in The American Prospect magazine. It gives an excellent overview of what’s happening around the country, and particularly in Colorado, around high-stakes standardized testing.
I worked with a group of talented inner-city teachers from throughout the United States last year through the Center For Teaching Quality. We created a pretty thorough report, “Transforming School Conditions: Building Bridges to the Education System That Students And Teachers Deserve.” You can read my summary of the report in The Washington Post, as well as finding a link to the entire study.
The American Association of School Administrators has published the text of a speech (and the video) Diane Ravitch gave at their recent conference, and I don’t think you’re going to read or hear a better commentary on education anywhere. You can read the text of her speech here.
Here are links to the video of her speech, dividing into three parts:
Here’s a great column from The Seattle Times pointing out that small class sizes were important to Bill Gates when he went to school, and are an important reason why he sends his kids to the school they attend.
Though it’s not an article or post, The Daily Show with Diane Ravitch has to be on this list. It was a classic. Jon Stewart opened with what was probably the most insightful, funny, and effective response I have seen to on-going teacher-bashing. Ten minutes later, Diane Ravitch came on and did a fabulous interview. The first two videos are the two segments of the amazing opening piece on schools, and then the third is the interview with Diane Ravitch:
I usually just do a year-end list on this topic and many others, but it gets a little crazy having to review all of my zillion posts at once. So, to make it easier for me — and perhaps, to make it a little more useful to readers — I’m going to start publishing mid-year lists, too. These won’t be ranked, unlike my year-end “The Best…” lists, and just because a site appears on a mid-year list doesn’t guarantee it will be included in an end-of-the-year one (especially since this mid-year list is so long and will have to be trimmed-down). But, at least, I won’t have to review all my year’s posts in December…
You might also be interested in these previous editions:
The Test Generation is an article by Dana Goldstein that was published in The American Prospect magazine. It gives an excellent overview of what’s happening around the country, and particularly in Colorado, around high-stakes standardized testing.
I worked with a group of talented inner-city teachers from throughout the United States last year through the Center For Teaching Quality. We created a pretty thorough report, “Transforming School Conditions: Building Bridges to the Education System That Students And Teachers Deserve.” You can read my summary of the report in The Washington Post, as well as finding a link to the entire study.
The American Association of School Administrators has published the text of a speech (and the video) Diane Ravitch gave at their recent conference, and I don’t think you’re going to read or hear a better commentary on education anywhere. You can read the text of her speech here.
Here are links to the video of her speech, dividing into three parts:
Here’s a great column from The Seattle Times pointing out that small class sizes were important to Bill Gates when he went to school, and are an important reason why he sends his kids to the school they attend.
Though it’s not an article or post, The Daily Show with Diane Ravitch has to be on this list. It was a classic. Jon Stewart opened with what was probably the most insightful, funny, and effective response I have seen to on-going teacher-bashing. Ten minutes later, Diane Ravitch came on and did a fabulous interview. The first two videos are the two segments of the amazing opening piece on schools, and then the third is the interview with Diane Ravitch:
Transocean (greatly responsible for last year’s Gulf Oil Spill) just gave their executives huge bonuses because of their…safety record. Jon Stewart does a great short bit on it. It seems to me this is a good example of either Campbell’s Law, or and example of how incentives don’t work, or both.
I also share a list of Post Rank’s analysis of each month’s top posts. Post Rank uses a variety of ways to measure level of “engagement” that readers have with specific blog posts. I have a constantly updated “widget” on my blog’s sidebar that lists these posts, but I thought a monthly post would be helpful/interesting to subscribers who don’t regularly visit the blog itself.
I regularly highlight my picks for the most useful posts for each month — not including “The Best…” lists. I also use some of them in a more extensive monthly newsletter I send-out. You can see back issues of those newsletters here and my previous Best Posts of the Month at Websites Of The Month.
These posts are different from the ones I list under the monthly “Most Popular Blog Posts.” Those are the posts the largest numbers of readers “clicked-on” to read. I have to admit, I’ve been a bit lax about writing those posts, though.
Here are some of the posts I personally think are the best, and most helpful, ones I’ve written during this past month (not in any order of preference):
Last night’s “The Daily Show” was a classic. Jon Stewart opened with what was probably the most insightful, funny, and effective response I have seen to on-going teacher-bashing. Ten minutes late, Diane Ravitch came on and did a fabulous interview. For some reason, I wasn’t able to get the embed code for the entire episode. However, I was able to embed the three key sections: The first two videos are the two segments of the amazing opening piece on schools, and then the third is the interview with Diane Ravitch:
Thoughts on Public Education is a very good blog covering California education issues. Their writers did a two part interview with Diane Ravitch today (of course, Diane will be on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show Thursday night, so I suspect she’s on a plane back to New York as I’m writing this). I was particularly impressed by the second part of the interview, which you can see below (it only lasts nine minutes). You can also get a transcript here.
Jon Stewart did a brilliant piece on teachers last night (You’ll certainly want to tune on Thursday night (I had originally written Wednesday by mistake) when he interviews Diane Ravitch). Here’s a portion of it:
For quite awhile, I’ve been accumulating resources documenting the growth in the United States in wealth and income inequality. I’ve been planning on using them to develop a simple lesson using some of them — both for my Theory of Knowledge class and for my Intermediate English class. I’ve got a few ideas, but thought I’d share the resources today and solicit suggestions from readers.
I was prompted to write this post today after reading Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times’ column titled “Our Banana Republic,” which certainly belongs on this list. Here’s an excerpt:
The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.
Resources to illustrate this kind of disparity on a world-wide basis can be found in two other “The Best…” lists:
The sites on this list, though, are specifically related to the United States.
The lesson plans I’ve seen on the Web seem pretty involved and complicated, and I want to develop, or learn about, one that is much simpler. All suggestions are welcome, including ones about additional resources.
I’m dividing this list into two sections. The first one includes infographics that might be accessible to English Language Learners. The second part shares articles that would have to have portions modified to make them accessible.
Here are my choices for The Best Resources About Wealth & Income Inequality:
A History of Poverty is an animated world map showing where poverty (and prosperity) have been most present over the past two hundred years. You can narrow it down by continent or county, too. It’s from the Christian Aid charity. After showing it to students, it could create a wealth of question-asking opportunities.
Recently, filmmaker Michael Moore spoke to public sector workers protesting in Wisconsin and said, “”Just 400 Americans — 400 — have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.” I’m an admirer of Moore, but he can also be guilty sometimes of a little hyperbole. I did find it interesting today, though, to read that The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel actually investigated his claim pretty thoroughly. Here’s their last line:
The BBC has an interactive chart builder that lets you compare Asian countries (and the U.S. and the U.K.) in terms of wealth, health, life expectancy, education and energy consumption.
Here are two articles I’m adding to this list that are definitely not accessible to ELL’s, but they have great information that could be used by a teacher:
The Guardian has published a very good animated video on income and wealth inequality in the United States. I’m embedding it below, but I’m not sure it will come through on an RSS Reader. If not, you’ll have to click through to the blog to see it.
Income inequality is increasing across much of the developed world, a trend that will continue unless governments move aggressively to arrest it, according to a report released Monday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Bill Moyers’ new show recently made its debut, and it looks like it’s going to be a winner. The first episode was on economic inequality. Here’s how it’s described:
Bill Moyers explores how America’s vast inequality didn’t just happen, it’s been politically engineered.
Ezra Klein at The Washington Post has published an important interview with Chrystia Freeland, author of “The Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.”
Income inequality is surging, and there are few countries where it is rising faster than the United States. The distance between rich and poor is greater in America than nearly all other developed countries, making the US a leader in a trend that economists warn has dire consequences. GlobalPost sets out on a reporting journey to get at the ‘ground truth’ of inequality through the lenses of education, race, immigration, health care, government, labor and natural resources. The hope is to hold a mirror up to the US to see how it compares to countries around the world.
I’m embedding the interactive below, but there’s much, much more to the site.
Valerie Strauss at The Washington Post today published another great animation illustrating some of the bizarre situations teachers can find themselves in when the latest school reform fads and “lingo” get embraced by some adminstrators. I thought it would be useful to collect that one, and the others I’ve published, into one place, and add more in the future.
I hope others will contribution new ones, too.
Here are The Best “Laugh While You Cry” Videos (if you are reading this on an RSS Reader, you might have to go directly to the post to see them all):
This is the video Valerie shared today. It’s on “differentiation” (note that this one includes a “colorful” or inappropriate word at the end):
Here’s the first one on “collaborative planning”:
This one is also on collaboration:
Here’s one called “Focus Walk”
Dan Brown created this imagined interview with Cathie Black, the newly nominated Chancellor of New York Schools. Some of her quotes are real:
Eduflack is the pen name of Patrick Riccards, who provides genuinely thoughtful commentary on education issues. He created this hilarious video, and describes it like this:
I Wanna Be offers a tongue-in-cheek look at some of those “experts” in the education space, and what happens when someone wakes up one morning thinking they should opine on education policy and practice.
“The Daily Show” with Diane Ravitch was a classic. Jon Stewart opened with what was probably the most insightful, funny, and effective response I have seen to on-going teacher-bashing. If these two videos don’t make you “laugh while you cry,” then I don’t know what will…
):
