In our newly constructed edu-corporate climate of “collaborative teaming” there will be, at first, too many meetings for any one teacher to have.
Time will be better served with an online collaborative component. It will save time, and allow people to “process” collaboratively at a time of their choosing, without being face-to-face. Most importantly, it will allow the time spent face-to-face to be well spent and at a higher level.
Former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch is a thinker and writer about Education without any need for reelection or selling standardized testing or programs to help student pass standardized tests.
She speaks the truth to the motley crew of Education (and I do use that term loosely) experts. The dialog going on in Washington between the Democrats and Republicans is ludicrous, and Diane debunks the foundations on which it is based, item by item, in a research-based, data-driven way.
Every teacher should take the time to watch this video. Take notes. These are our talking points in the war of ideas taking place in Education policy. These are our marching orders.
I’ve become a big fan of Diane Ravitch. Expect to hear more from her.
Fast Forward through the first 10 minutes of introductions, and start listening when you see Ravitch.
Diane Ravitch
New York University
82 Washington Square East
New York, New York 10003
E-mail: gardendr@gmail.com
Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
Buy/read more about this book:
Amazon.com
Teaching students to pull, edit and display valuable information from the internet in real time is probably the most important thing we can teach. We must develop a course of study which provides elementary level students with the tools and skills to do this. Use of RSS feed publishing, social bookmarking and use of visual tagging to set up automated online structures that pull valid sources of information and automatically display them in a useful way is the next step in “publishing.” Using the Internet to do “research” and a static display methodology such as Word or PowerPoint is no longer sufficient to prepare them for middle school.
Here’s the thing.
Charter schools get to dismiss any student who is not performing up to their standards.
I’ll say it again.
Charter schools get to dismiss any student who is not performing up to their standards.
Not performing academically, not performing socially, not performing behaviorally, and even if the student is doing ok, if the parents don’t perform, the student gets dismissed.
No wonder they have school-wide success at the end of every year. (Never mind those kids who were dismissed).
Look at the Kipp contract. Look at the rules for entering any charter school. In each case there are clear parent responsibilities and clear student responsibilities. That’s great, sure. But what happens when the parent or student fails to keep up to the charter school’s standards? They get tossed.
To where? Public schools of course.
Just today, we had a kid throw up in the main hallway. We had a kid so wound up he was having a melt-down in the office. Another went home to a friend’s house without telling anyone. If only we were a charter school! Boom, Boom, Boom. All three would be gone. No repeat offenders in the principal’s office. At Kipp, the parents have to be respectful of the teachers or, Boom, their kid is gone. Such a luxury.
In my school, (50%+ English as a second language, 40% special education, 76% free or reduced lunch, 40% student churn rate throughout each year, operating 47% over capacity on student registration, and too many misogynistic parents from developing nations), heck we could probably deep six about 30% of the students in a month. That would bring teacher-student ratios to a much more “successful” level. All the disruptive, don’t pay attention, parents-don’t-care kids would be gone. All the low scorers, gone, with a wave of the principal’s hand. What a dream.
Of course if you are trying to have a rational debate on national education policy, there is one bothersome little question. Where do they go when we’re all charter schools?
On the street, of course. There would be a great national underbelly of 2nd and 3rd grade drop outs. Commercials would depict them standing on street corners selling drugs.
Here’s an interesting thought. If they determine state penitentiary space needs 10 years out by the current reading scores of public school students in 3rd grade (which they do), imagine how much we’d be spending in tax dollars to build prisons? Starting immediately and not stopping.
That wouldn’t happen of course. “Ridiculous!” the charter school supporters would say, “We would just have to have a state school system for those kids.”
And then we’re back to the original discussion, about what we should do about national education policy.
Charter Schools are a non-starter for a general fix for education. They are just state sponsored private schools for anyone who can make them work.
Our hyperlinked life fosters shallow paranoia
Superficial fear, overthinking the points of silence.
And binary sarcasm doesn’t tell
Except to worst enemies, and best friends.
There in lies emoticons’ use
Roughshod road signs, for the momentarily emotionally disabled.
Emoticons are among the irritating things
Written emoticons, worse.
Removing meaning from dialog
Debasing language, a junk food trope.
As simile or metaphor, useless
Comparing two things, one unknown and one vapid.
I’ve been contemplating how to set up our computer lab, and the conventional wisdom seems to have something missing.
The Four Best Computer Laboratory Layouts for Schools have a lot of similarities to subdivisions in southern Florida.
Subdivisions are built to squeeze the most humans into one place while keeping them from interacting, “We love our neighborhood, but no, we haven’t really gotten to know the neighbors yet.”
It seems both traditional computer lab setups and subdivisions are designed for individual, parallel play, in a confined space.
But all the research points in the other direction. In computer labs there should be talking. Groups of children talking, sharing, collaborating. Student “experts” (in things like inserting pictures or downloading audio files) should feel free to get up and walk all the way across the room, if somebody over there needs help they can provide. It should be natural ongoing collaboration. You can read about how children cooperatively learn on the computer by reading the blog post titled Interactive White Boards and Joint Computing here and watch the video by Sugata Mitra outlining the research on which Nicholas Negroponte’s one-laptop-per-child project is based. Sugata Mitra also has a blog.
AssortedStuff blogged we should organize schools to make innovative learners. The 4-minute video he includes from Stephen Johnson is worth watching:
Unfortunately for me, I’m not dealing with a “should.”
I’m dealing with a “do it” and “do it now.”
I’ve got a room, a bunch of computers, just under a thousand students, and need to sort it out in a real way, soon.
As a public school teacher, I’ve got unlimited resources, as long as I don’t spend any money. I’ve got a trailer, 24 rather good desktops without flatscreen monitors. And a decision to try and carve out the next model for computer labs.
We’ve done more with less…
It’s my firm conviction computers are not for teaching technology, but for teaching art. (Read more about art and computers in the blog post “We are Vermeer” here…)
Art casts a wide net including: writing, drawing, photography, design, music, layout, and the organizational and collaborative skills to get those tasks done.
Therefore, the space in which computers are used by children should seem more like a artist’s studio than a factory bench. It should be a creative atmosphere, not an assembly line.
Big Projects & Radical Collaboration:
We have a number of large projects going or in the works. Our 5th Grade does a large-scale project in Social Studies using technology, which Jenny, Jennifer Metcalfe and I presented, in part, at ISTE for the last couple of years.
We’re also gearing up to try and launch a school-wide online newspaper. It’s less a rehash of paper school newspapers with lunch menus and the weather, and more of an online environment in which we can showcase all the online work that’s going on throughout the school. I’ve outlined ideas on how that might work in the blog post titled “Online Workflow for School Newspaper Defined” here.
So the stage is set to create and use a room in which computers are housed for innovation and collaboration. Bringing about all the “we shoulds” about such things being written in educational publications. (That’s not a slam on AssortedStuff. He’s helping.)
Here’s a stab at “doing it.” Please feel free to toss peanuts from the gallery:
User requirements:
1) The students need to be organized in small groups of 4 to 6, each with a computer, but in a concave circle so they can easily see one another’s computer and share ideas, as well as how-to knowledge quickly and easily.
2) Monitors must all face one way, so a single teachers can see everything that’s going on at one time.
3) I have only desktops to work with, no budget and I’m setting up in a trailer (I know, only the best for the next generation.).
3) There should be a relaxed “living room” feel to the place and the artwork should be anything BUT schematics of computers and warnings about Internet safety. The artwork should be artwork. Inspiring.
Taking inspiration from:
