May 22, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Factors Behind The Success Of Ontario’s Schools — Part One is the title of my newest post at Education Week Teacher.
It includes guest responses from the President of the Canadian teachers’ union, a vice-principal, and two parent leaders.
May 22, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
I have a huge backlog of resources that I’ve been planning to post about in this blog but, just because of time constraints, have not gotten around to doing. Instead of letting that backlog grow bigger, I regularly grab a few and list them here with a minimal description. It forces me to look through these older links, and help me organize them for my own use. I hope others will find them helpful, too. These are resources that I didn’t include in my “Best Tweets” feature because I had planned to post about them, or because I didn’t even get around to sending a tweet sharing them.
Here are This Week’s “Links I Should Have Posted About, But Didn’t”:
New Assessments for the Common Core State Standards has the latest information (April, 2012) for the upcoming “next generation” standardized assessments. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About The “Next Generation” Of State Testing.
Antarctica’s Emperor Penguins is a slideshow from The Wall Street Journal. I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Learning About Penguins.
The Secret to Dynamic Presentations is from Leadership Freak.
How to Present like Steve Jobs is from Kiss Metrics.
I’m adding both of those links to The Best Sources Of Advice For Making Good Presentations.
Panda Preschool is a video from The Smithsonian Channel. I’m adding it to The Best Sites To Learn About Pandas.
The Muppets Guide to Project-Based Learning (PBL) is a great post from Michael Milton. I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Cooperative Learning Ideas.
Why Storytellers Lie is from The Atlantic. I’m adding it to The Best Digital Storytelling Resources.
Here are some other regular features I post in this blog:
“The Best…” series (which now number nearly 900)
The most popular posts on this blog each month
My monthly choices for the best posts on this blog each month
Each month I do an “Interview Of The Month” with a leader in education
Periodically, I post “A Look Back” highlighting older posts that I think are particularly useful
Resources that share various “most popular” lists useful to teachers
Interviews with ESL/EFL teachers in “hot spots” around the world.
Articles I’ve written for other publications.
Regular “round-ups” of good posts and articles about school reform
May 21, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
2 Comments
A Significant Error That Policymakers Commit is a new post by Larry Cuban that I’m sure will be a candidate for the best educational commentary of the year.
In it, he discusses differences between “good” teaching and “successful” teaching, and describes “successful” learning. It’s too difficult — at least for me — to summarize succinctly, so I’d recommend you read his entire post.
Here are his final two paragraphs:
Not only does this policymaker error about quality classroom instruction confuse the personal traits of the teacher with teaching, it also nurtures a heroic view of school improvement where superstars (e.g., Geoffrey Canada in “Waiting for Superman,” Jaime Escalante of “Stand and Deliver”, Erin Gruwell of “Freedom Writers”) labor day in and day out to get their students to ace AP Calculus tests and become accomplished writers and achieve in Harlem schools. Neither doctors, lawyers, soldiers, nor nuclear physicists can depend upon superstars among them to get their important work done every day. Nor should all teachers have to be heroic. Policymakers attributing quality far more to individual traits in teachers than to the context in which they teach leads to squishing “good” teaching with “successful” learning doing even further collateral damage to the profession by setting up the expectation that only heroes need apply.
By stripping away from “good” learning essential factors of students’ motivation, the contexts in which they live, and the opportunities they have to learn in school–federal, state, and district policymakers inadvertently twist the links between teaching and learning into a simpleminded formula thereby mis-educating the public they serve while encouraging a generation of idealistic newcomers to become classroom heroes who end up deserting schools in wholesale numbers within a few years because they come to understand that “good” teaching does not lead automatically to “successful” learning. Fenstermacher and Richardson help us parse “quality teaching” into distinctions between “good” and “successful” teaching and learning while revealing clearly the error that policymakers have made and continue to do so.
I’m adding his post to The Best Places To Learn What Impact A Teacher & Outside Factors Have On Student Achievement.
May 21, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Usually, I just do a weekly “round-up” of these kinds of posts and articles, but I have a backlog:
Does the Common Core Matter? appeared in Education Week. I’m adding it to The Best Articles Sharing Concerns About Common Core Standards.
“Just Effective”: Is that good enough? is from Nancy Flanagan’s blog at Education Week. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About Effective Student & Teacher Assessments.
Educators Issue VAM Report for Secretary Duncan is from Anthony Code’s blog in Education Week.
One average to rule them all is from Joe Bower’s blog.
The Trouble With Pay for Performance is from Education Week. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning Why Teacher Merit Pay Is A Bad Idea.
Standardized Testing Fails the Exam is by W. James Popham and appeared in Edutopia. I’m adding it to The Best Posts On How To Prepare For Standardized Tests (And Why They’re Bad).
Judge Students’ Performance by Their “Greatest Hits Collection,” Say Some Educators is an article by Linda Blackford. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About Effective Student & Teacher Assessments.
May 20, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
2 Comments
Yesterday, I posted about Jay Mathews at The Washington Post including our high school in his list of top high schools in the United States — Washington Post Ranks Our High School Among Top Ten Percent In U.S.
This was our principal’s reaction:
Source: shareasimage.com via Larry on Pinterest
May 20, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
May 22nd has been named The International Day for Biological Diversity by the United Nations. In the United States, May 21st was designated Endangered Species Day by Congress.
I’ve just updated The Best Resources For World Biodiversity Day (& Endangered Species Day).
May 19, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Type in any name or topic into 25 Trends and you’ll get a neat visualization with links to related tweets. It seems useful and accessible.
I’m adding it to The Best Third-Party Twitter Apps That Don’t Require Your Password. By the way, I’ve just updated that list.
May 19, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
(UPDATE: Our principal, Ted Appel, has a pretty strong reaction to Jay’s list. Here is his response to it:
“These kinds of lists are meaningless, certainly not helpful, and quite possibly destructive to pushing schools towards practices which are focused on helping students get smarter and healthier. Two years ago we were on a list of schools described as ‘dropout factories.’ And now, two years later, without doing anything substantially different, we are listed among the top nine percent of high schools in the country only because a different metric was used. This seems to be a blatant example of how these types of quantitative evaluations lack substance.”)
Yes, rankings and schools are not a good mix. They can be easily manipulated in the worst ways and can seduce schools into doing things that are geared towards getting high-rankings that might not be in the best interests of student learning (similar to the dangers of being data-driven).
Given all that, sometimes it can’t hurt to be on one of those lists, especially if you don’t do anything specifically to get on it.
And being named today on The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews list of America’s most challenging high schools is not a bad one for our school, the largest inner-city high school in Sacramento, to be on. Even more so since teaching to any kind of standardized test is not encouraged and, instead, thanks to the leadership of our principal, Ted Appel, we focus on developing life-long learners.
And we certainly didn’t solicit being named — Jay called our principal out of the blue yesterday asking for some more information.
I still don’t quite understand how Jay comes up with his list each year, which highlights ten percent of the high schools in the United States, though he does offer this explanation. Here is his post on this year’s list. He also did a Q & A about it last year.
And here is our school’s page on the list.
Of course, there’s some irony here since, because of our School Board’s refusal to respect a judge’s ruling, we’re in line to lose twenty-one of our teachers who received their final lay-off notice three days ago.
May 19, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Stanford has created what I suspect is the coolest thing I’m going to see today — a Google Maps-like tool that lets you map the fastest and cheapest ways (by donkey is one option) and routes to travel (including how the time of the year affects it) in the ancient Roman World.
You can read a very useful review of the tool, called Orbis, here.
Here’s a video that provides an very clear explanation of it, too, though it really is very easy to use. My only gripe with the video is that it is so dispassionate that it gives no hint about just how cool the tool is:
The next time I teach World History and we’re covering the Roman Empire, you can bet I’ll be having students using it.
Thanks to Ed Yong for the tip.
May 19, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
We only have a few more weeks of school left, and I’m hoping I again survive next week’s annual field trip where I take 110 students to San Francisco from 6:00 AM to 11:30 PM. Don’t expect much blog or Twitter activity from me on Wednesday — the day after 
After school ends in mid-June, I’ll be focusing my efforts on writing a sequel to my book, Helping Students Motivate Themselves. In August, Jossey-Bass will release my newest book, The ESL/ELL Teacher’s Survival Guide (co-authored by Katie Hull Sypnieski).
Also, I won’t be publishing new posts at my Education Week Teacher blog between mid-June and September, though I will organize the fifty columns I have written there this past school year and periodically post “collections” of them (classroom management, student motivation, etc.).
My blogging schedule here will also probably be a little lighter, though I will be publishing several mid-year “The Best…” lists. I’ll also be continuing my work with the State of California’s Educator Excellence Task Force in developing recommendations on how to handle teacher evaluations.
Family time and playing basketball are, of course, also on the summer agenda!
In the fall, it looks like I’ll be teaching IB Theory of Knowledge, a combined Beginner/Intermediate ELL class, and a ninth-grade class mainstream English class. Of course, with all the lay-offs at our District and at our schools, it’s always possible I might end up teaching something else.
I’ll be re-starting my Education Week Teacher column then, and will also begin a bi-monthly Edutopia blog.
Of course, we all know what they say about the best laid plans….
May 19, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
I’m a longtime fan of “alternate history,” and last year was thrilled to read about how some teachers applied that concept in their classes.
This is how Carla Federman (who borrowed the idea from Diana Laufenberg) introduced her lesson to students:
You are to identify one specific point in American history for which you are interested in changing the outcome. Once you have identified your point of divergence, you will need to consider both the immediate changes and the long-term impacts that divergence would have on modern society. You will present your “revised history” through the creation of “new” primary sources and a multimedia project.
I’ve written about this idea, and included links to both Carla’s and Diana’s projects, in two previous posts:
Extraordinary “What If?” Student Project
Asking “Why Not?” & “What If?” As Well As “Why?”
In many of our classes, I think, students tend to look at history as just the learning of facts that are set in stone and almost as destined to be…
Through a “What if?” project, I think students can gain a greater grasp of the fragility, interconnections and imponderables that we confronted in our past and will face in our future.
I’ve finally gotten around to trying it out in my own classes.
Earlier this month I did a what I think is a scaled-down version of what Carla and Diana did. I gave my IB Theory of Knowledge students a couple of days to work in pairs and develop a short PowerPoint presentation. They then gave three-to-five minute presentations, during which all students had to come up with a question and the presenters picked on one student to share theirs.
You can see the lesson and links to PowerPoints at our Theory of Knowledge class blog, and I’ve embedded one example below:
It was a fun, useful lesson — an excellent one to do near the end of the year so students could take a short break from the intense experience of having to write their TOK final essay.
In two weeks, I’ve arranged for my TOK students to come in to my Beginning/Intermediate ELL United States History class to help them develop similar projects, though they’ll probably be on posters and not in PowerPoints.
I also had my TOK students respond to a few reflection questions. Here are some responses:
What Did You Like About The “What If?” Project?
Many students said it was “fun.”
I liked that the presentations were short and simple.
I liked how it was simple and complicated at the same time.
It was fun using our imagination.
I really liked people asking good questions.
I liked how we could see that a little event from the past could change the future by a lot.
How Could The Project Have Been Better?
It could have been better if we had more time.
What Did You Learn About History?
I learned that one minor event can change history on a major scale.
Every event can have an impact on what is happening right now.
The present might have been better if some things happened but our present isn’t as bad as what could have happened.
The fact that a tiny change in the past could lead to a dramatic change in the future.
I learned that in history even the smallest detail counts, especially when you are researching it, as it can lead to some very unexpected results.
I learned a lot from my classmates, including many real events that I hadn’t even known had occurred.
I’ll report how things go with my ELL class in June.
Have any of you tried similar projects?
May 19, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
The National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition (NCELA) has just unveiled a newly-designed website. Here’s how it describes the site:
NCELA is proud to present our newly designed website (still at www.ncela.gwu.edu) that combines high-quality and oft-requested information about the English learner population with new features to make navigation easier and more intuitive. The website has a distinctive new look, and a thorough restructuring of the front page, bringing up-to-the-minute information to the fore. Visitors will find it easier to access key online content areas including information on federal grants, EL data and demographics, professional development, promising practices in EL education, and the full suite of NCELA resources.
I’m adding it to The Best Ways To Keep-Up With Current ELL/ESL/EFL News & Research.
May 19, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Bill Moyers has just published a collection of twenty-one historical protest songs, including videos of artists performing them. There are also many additional suggestions included in the comments on his post.
I’m adding it to The Best Sites For Learning About Protests In History.
May 19, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Every monthI 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.
If you don’t use Twitter, you can also check-out all of my “tweets” on Twitter profile page or subscribe to their RSS feed.
I use Storify to “curate” my best tweets:
May 19, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
1 Comment
Memorial Day is coming up in the United States.
I’ve gotten a chance to update most, but not all, of the resources at The Best Websites For Learning About Memorial Day.
Additional suggestions are welcome.
May 18, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
There has been a lot of research on the role of exercise in helping learning, and I’ve gathered much of it in The Best Resources On How Exercise Helps Learning.
And, now, there’s one more study to back up the connection — especially for young people.
It came from Dartmouth, and here are their conclusions:
“The implication is that exercising during development, as your brain is growing, is changing the brain in concert with normal developmental changes, resulting in your having more permanent wiring of the brain in support of things like learning and memory,” says Bucci. “It seems important to [exercise] early in life.”
May 18, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Here are a few recent posts/articles on motivation:
Dan Pink on Why “Passion” Doesn’t Matter appeared in The Huffington Post.
Hospital pay incentives fail to help patients: study appeared in Reuters.
My Colleague, My Paymaster appeared in The Wall Street Journal. I’m not sure what to think of it…..
May 17, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
3 Comments
I’ve often written in this post and in my books about how I use the “marshmallow test” in lessons on self-control (see The Best Posts About Helping Students Develop Their Capacity For Self-Control).
Today, Sarah Sparks at Education Week has written an article providing new information for a great addition to those lessons.
Here’s the excerpt that is perfect:
Texting seems to have become the new “marshmallow test” for older students, and with similar results.
In a 2011 study, researchers led by Mr. Rosen, who is a psychology professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills, randomly assigned 185 young college students with A and B grade averages to watch a video lecture, on which they knew they would be tested. During critical sections of the lecture, the researchers texted each student either four or eight times with questions that had nothing to do with the lecture and asked them to respond “promptly,” or did not text them at all.
Students who received eight text messages scored more than 10 percent lower on the test, about the equivalent of a full letter grade.
Yet students’ response times to the text messages made a big difference in how well they did. Students who answered the texted questions within five minutes of receiving them—while the critical material was presumably being discussed—answered 75 percent or fewer correct on the test, while those who held off five minutes or more scored 85 percent correct.
Researchers led by Fang-Yi Flora Wei, an assistant broadcast communications professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s Bradford, Pa., campus, likewise found students with greater self-control were less likely to text in class and more likely to attend to content. Ms. Wei’s study is published in the April issue of the journal of the National Communication Association, Communication Education.
The whole article is definitely worth reading, and includes links to all the cited studies. Once I create an addendum to my previous lessons, I’ll try it out with students and publish it here. I suspect it will really resonate with them.
May 17, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
The Benefits of Being Bilingual is a new column by Jonah Lehrer at Wired that provides a good overview of recent research on the topic.
I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning The Advantages To Being Bilingual.
By the way, Lehrer, the author of “Imagine,” which is currently Number One on The New York Times bestseller list, has agreed to write a guest post for my Education Week Teacher column. It will appear later this month.
May 17, 2012
by Larry Ferlazzo
0 comments
Slide.ly is a brand new site that is still closed to the public (but you can find an invite if, as I did, you just search for “Slide.ly + invites” on the Web and you’ll find a number of tech blogs that have free invites), but it looks very good — and very similar to Animoto.
You can search for photos online or use your own, and easily combine them with music to create musical video-like slideshows. I’m adding it to The Best Ways For Students To Create Online Videos (Using Someone Else’s Content), and I also have a link to that list on The Best Ways To Create Online Slideshows.
Thanks to TechCrunch for the tip, where you can also read more about Slide.ly.
