This week I have read some great articles ranging from advice for new teachers, to becoming transformational leaders. I also read one article that talks about inquiry based learning on one hand, while supporting standardized testing. I do not always agree with the articles that I post, but I put them up here if they have made me think about my own practice. Isn’t that what a good article should do?
Short summaries and snippets from the articles are listed below:
- Advice for New Teachers – Great article…a lot of this advice would not have existed when I started teaching!
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Sign on to Twitter if you are not already there. Start following the smartest people you can find in your areas of interest. Build a great PLN – personal learning network – of the smartest and most helpful people you can find. Follow people with whom you agree and follow people with whom you disagree. Follow people like you; follow people not like you. One place to start looking: Twitter for Teachers wiki.
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Assume that your older colleagues want to be helpful and see you succeed. This includes administrators. Invite them to your classroom. Ask their opinion. Ask to see them teach – or whatever it is they do. See if you can find a project of theirs in which you can participate.
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Seek out colleagues and learn with them and from them. Appreciate the wisdom of veteran teachers. Avoid at all costs those who are cynical about children, have stopping learning and are nodes of negativity about the school. This may means avoiding the faculty room. Seek out colleagues who share your commitment to learning. Hang out with them and do something fun.
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- Top 10 Roadblocks to Change – Principal Eric Sheninger gives some great points on what is stopping schools from change. Eric believes that if you are truly a “transformational leader”, you will take people where they need to be. Read this article.
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Upon reflecting on my keynote, as well as other presentations given by Steve Anderson, Tom Whitby, and Sarah Brown Wessling, (2010 National Teacher of the Year) I have been able to identify common roadblocks to the change process. If identified and addressed appropriately these roadblocks can be overcome.
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- Education Week: Study: Effective Principals Embrace Collective Leadership – I believe in collective leadership and it was great to see an article that confirms it is a successful practice.
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Successful principals “were setting the conditions that enabled the teachers to be better instructors,” she said.
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“It is not the case that the principal is the only person who can lead a school to higher achievement,” Mr. Pauly said. “If nobody in a school, or few people in a school, see it as their priority, then that school has a big problem.”
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Some district policies intentionally rotate principals into new buildings every three to five years out of a belief that frequent moves eliminate complacency, Ms. Wahlstrom said. “To move them around just to move them around is probably not a good idea,”
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By the same token, district leaders should think carefully before moving “star” principals into struggling schools—a strategy also emphasized in the U.S. Department of Education’s initiative for turning around failing schools
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He also said he appreciated the study’s promotion of collective leadership among principals, teachers, and parents. “In the best performing districts, all of those elements have a voice in the decision making process,” he said.
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- Can You Teach Emotional Intelligence? Behind the Movement for Social and Emotional Learning – A great article that shows how much we can learn from Special Education practices in all of our classrooms.
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In a neighborhood where safety is fragile, Roepke’s all-clear was a statement about much more than a make-believe animal.
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“Our kids need a peaceful place,” the school’s principal, Eileen Reiter, told me in her tidy office lined with baskets of children’s books. “Our kids’ lives are so chaotic, I can’t even tell you. There are kids in foster care, or whose parents are in jail. I have a hundred million stories. So it has to be a place where kids can come and feel relaxed and feel safe and get a lot of support.”
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Support, in this case, means more than just academic training and a hot lunch. Reiter has embraced a philosophy known as social and emotional learning, called SEL by its proponents, that focuses on teaching children the skills and strategies to recognize and moderate their own emotions and to manage conflicts with others.
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Studies show that students in SEL programs not only perform better on achievement tests, but also have significantly fewer suspensions and expulsions, better school attendance, higher grades, and decreased prevalence of high-risk behaviors such as violence and drug and alcohol use.
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Additionally, multiple studies show that students who develop emotional bonds with their classmates and with teachers who have high expectations adopt a positive attitude toward academic achievement, learning, and school in general.
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- How to Ignite Intellectual Curiosity in Students – I wanted to share this article because it takes about critical thinking and inquiry on one hand, but the author also states that they are not against the standardized testing that is happening in the United States. I have never seen those two ideas working together in a similar article. What are your thoughts?
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If we are trying to get our students to participate fully in the inquiry process, we have to remember that most likely, they have been conditioned to do the opposite of inquiry — shut up and listen. Depending on the severity of the case, this may take a while to get them “unconditioned.”
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Just so you understand where I come from, I believe that there are many things in the current educational system that need to be changed, however, state standardized testing is not one of them. I firmly believe that NCLB, although not perfect, is a great step in the right direction. I believe this because I have seen administrators and teachers, who, previously concerned only about local grades and behavior for some students, now are concerned with all students actually learning something.
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- YouTube – Personal Learning NetworksWill Richardson talks about Personal Learning Networks and helps to explain the importance of having students leverage their own PLN’s since they are already using their own personal networks.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
