By Kristin

Should curriculum be narrowed down until it is comfortable for each student?  Seattle Public Schools recently required Race
and Justice curriculum taught in a senior class at the Center School to be suspended after a student felt “intimidated.” The teacher, Jon
Greenberg, was transferred to Hamilton Middle School after Center School students protested the course restrictions.  While this has been discussed in my district as an issue of academic freedom, I see it as something even more important – as a parent, I see it as other parents deciding what my daughters can and cannot learn about in school, and that deeply concerns me.

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By Tom

The National Council for Teacher Quality (NCTQ) just came
out with a review
of America’s education schools. And it’s caused quite a stir. I spent most of
the first day of my summer vacation sifting through it, and I’ve got several reactions.
But before I get there, a quick word about my own perspective: For the past
eight years, I have served on the Board of Examiners for the National Council
for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). In that capacity I visit two colleges
of education each year, collaborating on a standards-based report, which
eventually leads to the accreditation. (Or, in some cases, doesn’t) NCATE
accreditation isn’t universal; many states require it, although some states –
like Washington – let colleges decide whether or not they want to pursue it. Every
state, however, does have some form of standards-based accreditation for higher ed programs.

Now for the NCTQ review.

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By Mark

It sounds like Tom has a budding pilot on his hands–and he's absolutely right that any good lesson, whether in the cockpit or the classroom, is going to have a lot of the same "pieces."

My boss forwarded me an article that took a different angle on the plane analogy. This connection, though, was not about teaching a young, intrepid pilot. Rather, it was about what happens when the plane goes out of control.

On page of 41 Bryan Goodwin's McREL 2010 publication "Changing the Odds for Student Success: What Matters Most," the author draws an example from the book Everyday Survival by Laurence Gonzales: 

In the early days of aviation, the spin was a mysterious event, a death spiral from which pilots rarely recovered. Knowing that, a pilot who found himself in a spin would bail out if he happened to be blessed with a parachute. And then people began to notice something strange. After the pilot bailed out, the plane would sometimes right itself and fly on until it crashed or ran out of fuel. A clever pilot proposed this: the airplane wasn't at fault. The pilot was doing something to keep the airplane in the spin. Remove the pilot, and you solve the problem. Pilots began to learn how to recover from spins by doing less, not more.

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By Tom

My youngest son has expressed interest in pursuing a career
as a pilot. He turned 14 last month, so we gave him a flying lesson for his
birthday. The lesson was last Saturday and it was wonderful. But before I tell you
all about it, let me digress for a bit.

Thirty years ago, as I was starting my teaching career, the
big, new book that every teacher had to read was Madeline Hunter’s Mastery
Teaching. This was the dawn of Instructional Theory into Practice, better
known as ITIP. Hunter’s “innovation” was the seven-step lesson plan, which she
gleaned from studying thousands of effective teachers and analyzing what they
did. It was a no-nonsense approach to lesson planning and instruction, an
approach that’s worked for many of us to this day.

Let’s get back to the airfield. My son sat down with his
instructor. I forgot the guy’s name, but he started off by asking my son
whether he’d ever been in a small plane or not. “There it is,” I thought, “Pretesting;
he wants to know what my son already knows.” After that he pulled out a map of
the Seattle area. He took a toy plane and showed my son where we would be going
and exactly what he’d be doing in the plane. In other words, he was stating the
objective.

Then he pulled out a giant poster of a cockpit. He explained
the controls and some of the gauges and dials that would be important on this
trip. This was important, new information; otherwise known as input.

After that we went out to the plane, and the instructor led
my son through the pre-flight checklist and got us both buckled in and set up
with our two-way headphones. Then we took off.

At first they both had their hands on their steering wheels (actually
they’re called “yokes”) and the instructor helped correct my son’s attempts to
steer. But he gradually released control as my son gained confidence. It was a
textbook example of guided practice. After about thirty minutes, my son was
flying the plane himself; turning, going up and down, you name it. It was
awesome. It was independent practice.

The instructor took over for the landing. Apparently that’s
where it gets tricky. After we landed, he sat us down to go over the flight, celebrate
my son’s success and tell him what the next steps would be. It was closure.

Now I don’t know if flight instructors read Madeline Hunter
or not. I doubt it. But I do know that effective instruction is important to
them. It’s actually a matter of life and death. And when you get right down to it, good teaching is good teaching, whether it's in a classroom or an airplane. 

The bottom line,
however, is whether or not the student learned something.

You be the judge:

By Kristin

The New York Times reports that New York will now include standardized tests in art, gym, foreign languages, kindergarten and first grade, and English Language Learning.

I suppose we all saw this coming. It's an unfortunate response to states being pushed to grade every teacher and the inequity of only some teachers teaching tested subjects.  But a standardized test for art or gym?  Really? A standardized test for kindergarteners?  Really?

The single biggest problem with the direction testing is going is that instead of assessments being used to support student growth, which is how I use them, students are being asked to spend inordinate amounts of time supporting the measurement of their teachers.  It's not about the kids, and it's not ethical.  

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By Kristin

This year I taught a reading intervention class and was given one task: teach my students what they needed to know to be at or above grade level standard in reading.

Our goal was no secret, and from the first moment I saw my students I was like Jillian Michaels, ignoring the whining, forcing them past the fear and being honest with where they were and what they had to do.  It was exhausting, and we didn't let even a minute slide by.  No singing Happy Birthday, no holiday parties, no movies.  After the big test, we took one day off to celebrate our hard work before hitting the mental gym again.  Why?  Because now our goal is to be above grade level.  We continue to use every second  and to work as hard as we can.  Except for last Tuesday, when in my heart I know my 6th period spent the most important ten minutes of the year.

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By Tom

I’ve always had a loose relationship with Memorial Day. I
loved celebrating it, of course; what’s not to love about a three day weekend?
But the meaning of Memorial Day was always somewhat abstract, probably because
I’ve never actually had a member of my family die in battle. I had a
great-great grandfather who survived the Civil War (he was a Confederate
private), my grandfather’s family fled the Ukraine to avoid the Russo-Japanese
War, my father missed World War II but ended up on an aircraft carrier during
the Korean War. And although the pilots who took off from his ship didn’t
always make it back, he never saw any direct action. As for myself, I was
fourteen when Vietnam ended. Thank God.

So growing up, Memorial Day has never meant much more to me than a long
weekend in May.

As a teacher, I’ve always marked Memorial Day with an
explanation of what it means and what we’re supposed to be honoring with our
day off. And since I work with young children, they have always been eager to
share their stories of relatives who died in war. (Or simply died, although I
try to move those stories along) This has been a staple of my May lesson plans
for decades.

Recently, however, my Memorial Day lesson has become a little
awkward, and it has to do with where I work.

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